A film worth mulling over this week is Force Majeure by the Swedish director Ruben Östlund. A sharp investigation into personal responsibility, this is a film where none of the adults comes out unscathed.
Tomas and his wife Ebba are on holiday in an upmarket ski resort with their two children. Rich, good-looking and contented, the family sport expensive clothes, converse bi-lingually and lounge long-limbed on the ultra-luxe hotel beds. Ski lifts clank up and down, regular explosions resulting in controlled avalanches are heard on the mountainsides, and the family smile for photos.
But only minutes into the film disaster strikes. This is not, therefore the typical disaster movie set up where half an hour later we’re still waiting for the boat to sink or the plane to crash (with predictable outcomes). Instead, Östlund offers us the family having lunch and enjoying the view of the mountainside when we hear the now familiar boom of an explosion. This time though the avalanche seems to be heading straight for the restaurant and diners. Ebba grabs the children and pulls them under a table for safety. Tomas grabs his iPhone and bolts.
The avalanche is the central scene of the film. Shot by Fredrik Wenzel and Arne Wegeland it perfectly captures the torrential force of the mountains. It also heralds the force majeure of the title – an event which marks a break in the established order.
A few minutes later the avalanche is over. The family survives and are brushing off the snow when Tomas reappears as if nothing has happened. The children, shocked by the events, demand to know where he went. Ebba looks confused when he insists that he was there all along. What results is the meat of the film; the subsequent disintegration of family relationships resulting from Tomas’ seeming desertion. Is he a liar or is he deluded?
Meanwhile the whole gloomy Nordic weight of guilt and introspection bears down on poor Tomas, and the truth of the event unravels. Tomas is stripped of his civilised mask and in doing so the audience is shown just how brittle that mask really is and that we are all ultimately made of the same weak materials, revealing selfish weak children underneath.
Just how weak we all are is shown in the rather too-neat and irony laden ending. There are no heroes in this film.
An observant and clever, if not wholly satisfying, film.