If death and taxes are the fabled two certainties of life, then attacks on the aristocracy and outrage over awards shows are the two certainties of cinema. With the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences set to bestow a new fleet of Oscar statuettes on their films of choice this weekend (and I promise, dear readers, that next time I’ll get back to writing about the obscure 1960s foreign films you’ve all been clamoring for), perhaps now is the time to talk about one film — and one filmmaker — that won’t be at the party.
Ruben Ostlund, writer and director of “Force Majeure,” Sweden’s passed-over entry to the foreign film race, turned some heads when a video of his reaction to the livestream of the Oscar nomination announcements surfaced on Youtube. It is understandable for a director to freak out about missing a ticket to the Academy Awards. While the prizes themselves don’t always indicate a film’s future reputation (just ask “Citizen Kane”), for international directors a nomination from the Academy can be the difference between earning a more widespread viewership and slipping into obscurity.
Something is definitely awry in Ostlund’s reaction video — after wandering off-screen, his producer is heard advising him, “don’t strip” — and in light of his film’s satirical take on societally approved standards of behavior, it’s easy to read the video as a farce making fun of the song and dance around the awards race. In any event, neither the director’s questionable behavior (whether real or scripted) nor the Academy’s indifference takes away from the mighty achievement of the film itself.
“Force Majeure” opens on the slopes of the French Alps, where a picture-perfect Swedish family is posing for a fittingly perfect picture. Tomas and Ebba, the happily married parents of frisky munchkins Vera and Harry, are taking a much-deserved vacation from their chilly Scandinavian homeland at a luxury ski resort with all the finest accommodations: fine dining, rooms airlifted out of an IKEA catalogue and spectacular views of the Alpine locale. While enjoying lunch on a veranda overlooking the mountainside, a snowslide begins its majestic descent downhill for the pleasure of the smartphone-wielding crowd of diners. Things snowball, if you will, and the snowslide turns into a full-on avalanche that closes in with increasing rapidity on the increasingly panic-stricken crowd. Abandoning wife and children, Tomas hightails it out of there with only skis and iPhone in tow.
The avalanche turns out to have been a false alarm, but Ebba’s alarm at her husband’s reaction and his subsequent denial of his desertion is real. The remainder of the film puts Tomas and Ebba’s marriage — as well as upper-class marriages more generally — under the magnifying glass until it begins to fry. Tears are shed by man and woman alike, red wine is downed by the gallon and a drone is thrown in for good measure. Ebba, played with the iron-blooded resolve of Nordic native Lisa Loven Kongsli, gets her fair share of time to brood and yell, but Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) runs away with the show as the patriarch under pressure whose broken pride exposes the man-child running around in his Gillette commercial-ready body.
Unless you’re either married or Swedish, the appeal of “Force Majeure” may not be readily apparent (when I saw it in theaters last fall I was easily the youngest moviegoer in the packed audience by at least 40 years). Nevertheless, Ostlund’s exacting filmmaking and darkly comedic edge has plenty to offer to movie lovers of any variety. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being stuck between parents or friends as a petty disagreement escalates to volcanic proportions, you’ll find that Ostlund’s dialogue rings frighteningly true to the way arguments play out in real life. Even though Ostlund squarely aims his criticisms at a Western-European upper class with its overabundance of nice things, everybody will squirm at the questions he raises about how modern society has trained us to instinctively reach for our prized hardware before our flesh-and-blood relatives in the face of danger.
Just as exacting as Ostlund’s dialogue is his knack for crafting striking images. “Breathtaking” has fallen into overuse in film criticism, but I’m hard-pressed to find a better word to describe the immaculate expanses of mountain snow as framed and visualized here. Ostlund and his cinematographer Fredrik Wenzel also make excellent use of white space. Not only do the widescreen snowbanks dwarf the characters, further underscoring the pettiness of their first-world problems, but snow completely engulfs the frame and everything in it during the film’s two most pivotal moments. Ostlund is a director who knows the power of emptiness and harnesses it to its fullest potential; anyone can cut to white during a snowstorm, but only the most experienced of filmmakers will keep you in suspense for a full, interminable minute while waiting for the snow to subside.
From the standpoint of February 2015, it’s tough to say what will become of “Force Majeure” down the line. Already several of its fans have taken to decrying the injustice of its Oscar snub and proclaiming it one of the greatest films of 2014. “Force Majeure” will have to settle for being the also-ran in this year’s foreign film awards race, but so long as Ostlund continues to churn out such deliciously fastidious satires he may very well end up the winner in the long run.
Tim Markatos is a senior in the College. THE CINEMA FILES appears every other Friday.
