Sunday, May 24, 2015

Force Majeur

A noteworthy cringe comedy, the Swedish film, Force Majeur punches way above its weight -- it's like an extended and metaphysical version of Louis, squirm-inducing silences punctuated by gales of man-tears.  A married couple, Ebba and Tomas, both of them disconcertingly fit and handsome, have booked a ski vacation in the French Alps.  The ski lodge where they are staying is atop an enormous precipice, surrounded by sinister-looking peaks -- it is like Kubrick's Overlook Hotel, although less cozy, an impression fostered by the film's division of the family's stay into separate days announced ominously by black and white intertitles.  Ebba and Tomas have two similarly perfect children and the family spends quality time together deploying their identical Sonicare toothbrushes, all four of them staring into the hotel's mirror as the toothbrushes remove harmful plaque from their perfect teeth.  One afternoon, an avalanche plunges from an adjacent peak and rushes down into the valley.  Tomas thinks that it is a "controlled" avalanche, but the wall of snow surges up to the very edge of the terrace where they are enjoying their noon meal.  The avalanche, and the family's reaction to it, is filmed in a single long take and everything happens so swiftly that it's not entirely certain what we have seen -- a fog of snow hangs over the dining area on the terrace.  At first, everyone is mildly amused by the frisson of the avalanche, but, gradually, Ebba commences her prosecution of Tomas for cowardice:  she believes that Tomas fled from his imperiled family, pausing only to save his cell-phone.  Tomas denies Ebba's accusations, further infuriating her -- it's not the offence, usually, but the "cover-up" that gets you in trouble.  Husband and wife become increasingly irrational -- they decide to ski separately from one another and encounters with friends become increasingly tense as Ebba humiliates Tomas with accounts of his cowardice.  Fault-lines in their marriage are further exposed by the other Swedes at the lodge.  One of them is a beautiful young woman who has left her husband and children in Sweden to sleep with a succession of handsome strangers at the lodge -- she defends herself to the outraged Ebba who accuses her of being a bad mother.  But Ebba's concerns are obvious -- she is fearful, afraid of being left alone, a motivation that is evident when we see her shedding tears as she morosely urinates in a grove of trees, Tomas and her children shushing by on their skis.  Another mismatched couple spends time with Tomas and Ebba, an older man with a ridiculous red beard and his 20 year-old girlfriend.  Ebba taunts Tomas during their meal and asks him what he has to say for himself -- in an extraordinary image, the long silence is broken by a hobby-drone that Tomas has been playing with:  the drone emerges from nowhere and smashes the dinner party's wine glasses.  After the dinner party, the twenty year old girl accuses her lover of abandoning his wife and child -- at issue seems to be a fear of being "left" -- and puts the goofy-looking older man into a funk.  Things go from bad to worse to the extent that Tomas and Ebba's children are fearful that their parents will get divorced.  Tomas becomes hysterical in the hotel corridor, but the next day is redeemed when he mysteriously "saves" Ebba who has become lost in the fog -- presumably, she has staged her disappearance and rescue to restore Tomas' fragile male ego.  The film ends with a haunting and ambiguous coda:  the hotel guests depart the lodge in a bus that travels down a horrifically steep and switchbacked mountain road.  Ebba thinks the driver is inept and begins to harangue him when he has to back up to make a turn on one of the switchbacks.  She persuades the other passengers (with one exception) to get out of the bus and hike -- where?  it's not clear.  Tomas' manhood regained he lights a cigarette, astounding his daughter:  "I didn't know you smoked," he says.  "I do," Tomas says boldly.  This sequence is eerie and unresolved:  it seems that Ebba is a "nervous Nelly," a hysteric who imposes her fears on others.  Certainly, she is a bully and her harassment of the hapless bus driver doesn't improve his competency.  But, on the other hand, the bus driver does seem genuinely inept and may well be a menace -- and so, her fear is probably legitimate. 

Swedish director, Ruben Ostlund, has said that he made this movie to "discourage Alpine tourism (and) increase the divorce rate..."  The picture is very tightly constructed, combining a brittle and witty comedy of manners with strangely dreamlike images -- we see men wild with drink dancing and embracing at some kind of techno-rave party and a tiny drone explores the mountain peaks like a flying saucer.  Periodically, the soundtrack revs up with a super-charged accordion version of Vivaldi, that music accompanying shots of the ski slopes being groomed, snow being generated from huge cannon-like pipes, and the periodic boom of guns used to induced artificial avalanches.  These sequences are surreal and the physical environs of the ski resort takes on a sinister, alienated quality -- much of the action plays as if staged on some other planet in an alternate universe.  At one point, a cable car seems to rise vertically next to an improbably vast cliff and the road leading to the ski lodge is a narrow vertical ledge chipped into the face of a huge icy escarpment -- it's all vivid and slightly unreal. 

Curiously none of the critics who have reviewed this film -- and it is very highly regarded (Force Majeur won the Swedish equivalent of the Oscar) -- mention that it's plot reprises an earlier independently made film.  Perhaps, no one mentions this movie because no one can recall the film's name.  (At least, I can't recall what it was called or who made the picture).  In that movie, a young couple go for a hike in some remote mountainous area, probably in Turkey or the Caucasus.  They encounter bandits who brandish weapons at them and the man instinctively seizes his girl friend and uses her as a human shield.  The bandits depart without harming anyone, but, of course, the couple spend the rest of the film struggling with the emotional consequences of this incident.  As in Force Majeur, this earlier film features spectacular mountain scenery and the moment when the man behaves cowardly is so fast, only a couple of seconds, that if you blink you will miss it.  (In Force Majeur, a second viewing of the film shows that the wife's account of her husband's cowardice is, more or less, accurate -- although on first viewing, the avalanche occurs in such a way that you literally can not determine exactly how the husband responds.  A cell-phone video, however, is used to establish the truth.)  I recall this earlier film as being interesting if dour and pretentious.  Force Majeur is far better because it exploits the comic potential in this material and, as is the case with comedy, makes everyone look bad -- the characters in Force Majeure are all self-satisfied, narcissistic yuppies and so their comeuppance seems richly warranted. 

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