Force Majeure

Force Majeure (15)

Sweden/France/Norway/Denmark 2014 119 mins  Dir: Ruben Ostlund  Starring: Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Kristofer Hivju, Fanni Metelius  

A bourgeois, middle class Swedish couple and their two children arrive at an expensive ski lodge in the French Alps. Perhaps intentionally, they look like one of those mythical, idealised hard-working nuclear families we hear so much about. Gadget-loving dad Tomas (Kuhnke) is clearly successful, while mum Ebba (Kongski) is devoted to their two perfect kids – a boy and a girl, naturally. When a resort photographer takes a family snap, it resembles a picture from a high-class clothing catalogue. You hate them already, don’t you?

We soon learn, however, that all is not well beneath the expensive, well-manicured veneer. Minor irritations suggest that Tomas is a workaholic who neglects his family, and the holiday is intended to bring them back together. On day two, they’re enjoying the mountain view from a large outdoor restaurant when explosives trigger an avalanche. Ebba and the children watch nervously as it hurtles towards them, but Tomas insists blithely that it’s safe and controlled. Just as the avalanche is about to engulf everyone, Ebba grabs the kids. Tomas, meanwhile, snatches his iPhone and gloves and scurries away as fast as his legs can carry him.

As icy and unflinching as a Haneke film, Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s fourth feature reworks the disaster movie as a blackly comic, forensically precise exploration of masculinity and gender roles. Nobody dies. There’s no epic journey of survival. Instead, a relationship disintegrates before our eyes. After the whiteout clears, Tomas saunters back to the table and makes light of the situation. Nothing is said immediately, but it is clear that a rubicon has been crossed. The kids respond to the tension between their parents with bratty, inchoate resentment and anger. But Tomas’s actions eat away at Ebba more deeply. She makes him squirm with embarrassment as she describes the incident to strangers (“He got so scared that he ran away from the table!”), forcing him into the unsatisfactory defence that the couple have different interpretations of what happened. The arrival of Tomas’s beardy, divorced chum Mats (Hivju) and his 20-year-old girlfriend Fanni (Metelius) simply serves to increase the flow of corrosive acid seeping into this model marriage.

Ostlund’s viciously funny, magnificently controlled film explores unflinchingly such themes as contrasting marital expectations, the desire to keep up appearances, and the meaning, if any, of instinctive actions. The kids even become ‘weaponised’, to use the modish phrase, as devious, emotion-faking Tomas seeks to redeem himself through what appears to be reckless endangerment. An unexpected coda succeeds in raising the tension once again and should provoke much post-screening discussion – as well as the occasional divorce.