Force Majeure (2015)

Ruben Östlund has a scathing eye for social tensions. His films tend to scrutinize the moments before conflicts are about to erupt, and they let us follow the ways people try to handle these kinds of often understated eruptions. Force Majeure contains a dose of Östlund's rather grim sense of humor, along with a scenary that is a perfect frame for middle-class crisis: the holiday resort in the Alps.

The drama is centered around a family eating lunch when an avalance breaks out. Tomas grabs his mobile phone and runs away from the restaurant. His wife Ebba understands this as an expression of selfishness and even neglect. The ensuing drama zooms in on marital difficulties. How does Tomas understand the situation? His immediate reaction is to play the whole thing down. He doesn't see why Ebba is shocked - as he sees it, 'upset' - and tries to evade the subject. This makes Ebba feel even more hurt: she thinks that her husband is unwilling to face the truth of what the situation is really like. During all this, there kids are left to themselves. Östlund expertly captures the childrens' sadness and confusion with regard to the parents' conflict.

Force Majeure is a drama laced with caustic comedy. While some have interpreted the film as a film about masculinity, I would tend to view it as more relational. Gender is an important aspect, and Östlund studies the way the spouses' reactions are mutually aggravated in a process of ressentment, silence and outbursts. The wife's anger is coupled with the husband's silence and, later, outbursts - we get to see how destructive emotions are rolled into a complex situation of mutual distrust. At times, the film might lean towards cheap psychologizing and perhaps it can also be said to end up confirming many cinematic clichés about the hollowness of the seemingly ideal middle class life, but mostly, I found the excavation of uncomfortable revelation rather penetrating, given that I take the film to be a satire. 

Stylistically, Östlund borrows a lot from Haneke's clinical frames and sense of sparse location. The hotel is an impersonal space of corridors and balconies. Nature appears as a frightening setting of danger, but also as landscape domesticized by the tourist industry. The snow, the avalanches and the slopes are all seen as factors to be handled and controlled. And the whole thing is punctuated with a few bursts of music - by Vivaldi.

The flaws of the film can be derived from the director's attempt to add some dramatic frills to the basic outline. A few extra characters are thrown into the story, along with an extra catastrophy and an end that leaves one with rather counter-productive questions.