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| Johannes Kuhnke and Lisa Loven Kongsli are both exceptionally naturalistic in Force Majeure (Plattform) |
Isolation and distance
pervades Force Majeure, Swedish
filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s fictional account of a family vacation in the French
Alps gone awry. This film is set far up and far away; it’s covered in snow, mercilessly
devoid of distraction and routine.
A middle-aged married
couple, Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), take a week off
with their two children. Ebba is tired of solely caring for her children and
her home; Tomas works too hard and for too long at his indistinguishable job. Östlund’s
method of introduction is coldly romantic: there’s an old world typicality in
the way Tomas and Ebba relate, in the way their family of four operates, in the
way they choose a tourist-ridden, activity-laden ski resort as their vacation
spot.
And that’s exactly the
point. Force Majeure has a lot on its
mind about relationships and family, about men and women, about fulfillment and
contentment. It meshes people of different cultures – Swedes Tomas and Ebba
converse with Americans, Brits, the French and others – to dissect these generationally-differing
and universally-existent ideas. On paper, Force
Majeure is abstract and odd and idea-heavy – and in execution, it remains
so. But through Östlund’s vision, it’s also bracingly funny, pointedly
authentic and frequently fascinating.
Our dramatic catalyst
is a literal avalanche. Eating lunch on the balcony, overlooking a towering, awe-inspiring
mountainous landscape, a boom sends Ebba and her children into a panic. Tomas,
unfazed, takes out his iPhone to film, laughing and reassuring – he’s playing
that very masculine, typically patriarchal role. But the snow keeps coming,
faster, louder, seemingly uncontrollably. His camera shakes, the crowd runs and
screams, and a cloud of snow – through which no one, including the audience,
can see – takes over.
Östlund, methodically
and excruciatingly slowly, fades back in, with Ebba holding her two children.
Tomas, most un-heroically slumps back into frame – he had run away, abandoning
his family in a potentially fatal moment. This is where Force Majeure gets its start – that Tomas could, firstly, do such a
thing, but then more to Östlund’s point, refuse to admit it.
That initial question
is raised as Tomas and Ebba recount the event to other resort guests: what
would you do? And while it’s an important question the many characters
in Tomas and Ebba’s orbit consider, it’s a deliberately distracting inquiry.
Really, truly, Ebba cannot fathom or accept her husband’s inability to admit to
what he did, while Tomas cannot comprehend why Ebba sees it the way that she
does – though, eventually, his iPhone video proves her completely correct.
So what is Force Majeure, then? Answering that
question requires precise and full understanding of our initial introduction to
Tomas and Ebba. This is a film very concerned with accurately depicting “the
way we live now” – our habits with technology, in conversation, in ideas – and that’s
no isolated detail. It’s intrinsic to Östlund’s intent. Two people stuck in a
way of life that is very much of the past are thrust into a position where they
must look at each other and their life, and also themselves – contemporary
people living an old-world lifestyle.
Östlund, who also wrote
the script, situates his characters with unusual frequency in conversation and
in argument. This is where they reveal and conceal themselves, where they learn
and where they repress. He possesses the ability to reveal remarkable depth of character
in a line of dialogue, in a single laugh, in a momentary glance. And as Force Majeure continues on, Ebba’s
innate curiosity in lifestyles other than hers demonstrates the intelligence
and modernity of a woman that has succumbed to a lifestyle that is, frankly,
beneath her. Tomas’ false “perspective” reveals a crisis of masculinity that
cannot be helped or overcome, much as he so wishes.
In a sense, the
overriding argument here is that such a lifestyle doesn’t quite work anymore.
Ebba’s unending anger and frustration with her husband is misdirected: as she
recounts the story with tears streaming down her face, the subtext is “this is
who I married.” She’s principally disappointed in her husband’s reaction, and
he’s subsequently disgusted with himself. But there’s a greater idea that seeps
into the film’s core: is there any lifestyle that’s just right, that strikes
that perfect balance? The characters of Force
Majeure are all projecting, looking at others as a way of sadly identifying
their own issues.
The two eventually
connect with the much-younger Fanni (Fanni Metelius) and her older boyfriend,
Mats (Kristofer Hivju); temporarily, the focus shifts to them. They’re asking
each other, after hearing that infamous avalanche story: what would you do? Fanni
tells Mats he’d do exactly as Tomas – run without thinking after staying calm
for a moment too long. He’s offended, and she explains, this isn’t about men
and women: it’s about being of an older generation. “People from my generation
would stay with their children,” Fanni explains. Mats’ retort is critical: “I
take care of my family – I make sure they are taken care of.” This is a movie
flooded with such innocent lines that demand attention, that speak to the
attitudinal differences between men and women, old and young.
Force
Majeure is greatly
concerned with generational relationships to parenthood, to love, and to ideas
of gender. Ebba and Tomas (and Mats, for that matter) are stuck in a kind of
limbo, introduced to modern ideas but still internally mired by what their
parents instilled in them, by the world they grew up in. Mats loves his children,
but as Fanni reminds, they left him, along with his wife. There’s a
masculinity-driven distance that deters closeness in husband-wife and
father-children relationships – a distance that shrinks, generation by
generation.
But for all this
conversation about what Force Majeure
is about and what it’s trying to say, the method of its madness is what makes
it so special. It perfectly – I mean perfectly – captures the way we
hold onto such insignificant details and can’t let them go, and takes it a step
further by exploring why. Why can’t Ebba let it go, that her husband can’t
admit something she knows to be true? And why won’t Mats let that comment from
Fanni go? There are greater truths the characters in Force Majeure internalize by wholly focusing on random statements
and insignificant moments. But this is human nature, rarely explored but nailed
down with great naturalism by Östlund.
Östlund also goes much
deeper than expected. While he often slyly plays the crises of middle age and
masculinity for laughs, his most poignant and powerful drama is mined from the
work he does with Ebba and Tomas’ children. They are haunted and confused by
their parents’ fighting. The boy cries to his father, “I’m scared you’re going
to divorce.” There’s a perceptiveness and fear in these kids that Östlund
handles with great sensitivity and, again, authenticity. It feels real. It’s an
honest and bone-deep discussion about the complexities and contradictions that
come with creating a family unit, and with removing its artifice.
That idea is rendered
visually with astonishing beauty and expansiveness. When it’s time for Tomas,
Ebba et al to go skiing, they’re deep in the mountains, where all one can see
is white. It’s dreamlike, isolated to the point where it looks and feels like
an oblivion. Here, they are surrounded by absolutely nothing but each other,
and as they ski down the mountains, it’s into the unknown, into the grey, into
the depths of the oblivion. It’s wondrously scenic, but also reflective of
these characters’ inability to change, and to only drive further into the
isolated middle ground they are entrenched in.
The score is
understated aside from intermittent, loud bursts of anticipation. Only, in Force Majeure, that moment of reckoning,
that cataclysmic event that the music keeps hinting at almost satirically,
never comes. The avalanche affects no one. Ebba cannot really understand the
open sexual relationship of another woman; she’s just curious and just
enlightened enough, but on the other hand, she’s not. Tomas can have an epic
meltdown – played absurdly and tragically at the same time, a strange balance
operated sublimely in Force Majeure –
as he realizes his troublesome relationship to fatherhood and husbandry, but he
can’t quite subvert it. Up in the mountains, Ebba and Tomas are left to reflect,
and as they see themselves in the world more clearly, without any distractions,
they are unendingly frustrated. But that’s always where it ends.
Östlund ends his
picture with the group of vacationers returning home on a bus. Only, the driver
is struggling down the mountain – Ebba again fears for her children, that this
man will drive them off the cliff. She orders him to stop, exits in the middle
of the Alps with her children, and the rest of the bus is thrown into a panic.
Tomas and Mats look at each other in a strange moment of understanding, and
softly, reassuringly, they ask everyone to calm down, to relax. For Östlund,
this is not a moment where the characters change, where they’ve learned to be
better men, more conscientious people. No, this moment is perhaps the film’s funniest:
the entire scene is set around how desperately these two men are straining to
be what they are not, to project an image we know not to be true. And the final
shot, of families and couples, young and old and in-between, walking down the mountain,
averting a maybe-maybe-not crisis, is perfect for the majestic Force Majeure. There are a million ways
to live and to be, but we co-exist on this one planet. We’re argumentative and identity-conscious, and we possess that
tendency to project onto whoever’s walking next to us. And as Ebba and Tomas
figure out, there’s really nothing we can do about it.
Grade:
A
Nothing but positive things in this space; Andrew has some criticisms here.