Photographer: Magnolia Pictures
Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Vincent Wettergren, Clara Wettergren, and Lisa Loven Kongsli in the movie Force Majeure.
They look so together, like peas in a pods in their puffy, comfy-looking coats and winter gear. The photogenic nuclear family at the heart of the take-no-prisoners marital-discord yarn Force Majeure initially comes across as the epitome of familial harmony. The illusion is gone before the Swedish film's opening moments are over, when it's clear these parents are struggling to even get their sullen kids to pose properly.
Like so much of director Ruben Östlund's vicious, at times darkly funny portrayal of domestic malaise, that scene is a seemingly mundane harbinger of things to come. Force Majeure, which utilizes the term used to describe accidents beyond anyone's control, kicks into gear early on. Parents Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) are enjoying a meal with their young children, Vera (Clara Wettergren) and baby brother Harry (Vincent Wettergren), at the rooftop restaurant of the ski resort in the French Alps, conveniently located in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by mountains. The hotel's staff lord over the resort that's offset by detonating avalanches that interrupt its serenity with nerve-wracking booms. It's a thrilling sight to behold … until that particular day, just after lunch is served, when the tumbling snow appears to be heading straight for the diners. “Don't be afraid. It's controlled,” said Tomas with a certainty that quickly vanishes when they all realize the onslaught shows no signs of letting up.
Panic ensues, and resort guests wind up coated in a thin layer of powder snow. False alarm. Disaster has been averted, and the dazed diners begin returning to their tables. Ebba, Vera and Harry, however, try to spot Tomas amid the relieved guests. After what seems like an eternity but actually takes less than a minute, the patriarch reappears, rejoining his clan as if nothing had happened. Östlund initially resists explaining Tomas' behavior, focusing instead on a shell-shocked Ebba, who's finding it difficult to come to terms with her husband's abandonment. And so, an incident that should have been relegated to the kind of curious anecdote you'd tell friends at a party in between cocktails begins worming its way into the already-far-from-hunky-dory bourgeois unit, festering like a nasty virus until it leeches what little enjoyment the family was deriving from slicing through slopes in unison.
It doesn't take long for Ebba to start lashing out in unpredictable, passive-aggressive manner, publicly shaming Tomas in a quesy, cover-your-eyes scene that shows the suddenly estranged couple enjoying some time with another couple (Simon Killer's Brady Corbet plays the husband in a small cameo), at least until Ebba introduces the incident into their idle chatter. The kids are also upset, and begin acting out their resentment. “I'm afraid that you're going to divorce,” Harry blurts out when his dad asks him what's wrong. Ebba, on the other hand, asks to ski by herself, a dysfunctional family's version of asking for a personal day.
What Östlund captures with laser-like precision are the ways in which a holiday brings out the fissures in a marriage that a day-to-day routine is able to smother over. It's far from novel subject matter, but the filmmaker inserts some dry humor that prevents Force Majeure from turning into a tough slog. Also crucial here is the way he shoots the resort, an assortment of exterior and interior long shots in which he stands back to look at the family's disintegration within the context of this structure that becomes an all-encompassing entity, eerily echoing the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. (There's even a creepy janitor that looks on as Tomas and Ebba bicker in the resort's carpeted hallway.) The mise en scene also suggests a more playful variation on auteurs Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier. Vast unoccupied spaces are important in Östlund's universe to unsubtly convey the emotional chasm that separates husband and wife.
Almost at the halfway point, Östlund introduces another couple: bearded ginger Mats (Kristofer Hivju) and his much younger girlfriend Fanny (Fanni Metelius). They appear to be friends with Tomas and Ebba, though how they know each other is not spelled out. The film's centerpiece is a dinner during which Ebba confronts Tomas about the avalanche scare in front of the younger couple, leading to a fearless takedown of his bruised ego. Tomas insists his version of the event differs from his wife, though he never elaborates on how it departs from what we clearly witnessed earlier.
Despite some dead spots that could have been shortened – at nearly two hours, Force Majeure finds some of its potency diluted in the last 20 minutes – Östlund methodically tightens his vise on the audience and confounds expectations when he appears to be hinting at a more elliptical denouement. Credit the uniformly solid cast with imbuing their not-always-likable characters with empathy amidst the film's frigid tableaux. (I wouldn't be surprised if Hollywood seeks out Kuhnke, who looks like the love child of Stephen Dorff and Joel Edgerton.) And even though we've been down these slopes before, Östlund still delivers a tasty, surprisingly humane glimpse of a marriage put on ice.
Force Majeure starts Nov. 7 at the Miami Beach Cinematheque.
For showtimes, go to mbcinema.com.
