Force majeure
Crit
Think of it as Macomber facing a big scary avalanche rather than a big scary animal.Most of us, I suspect, never have the opportunity to learn what we would do if faced with potentially lethal physical danger. We'd like to think that we'd fall toward the right end of the hero-to-coward continuum, but it's one of those things you can't really have a dress rehearsal for, and most of us don't know.
This is about a man who is tested and fails, and it's less about the failure than about how you deal afterward with the wife and children who saw you run, with the world that has no idea or only a secondhand idea of what you've turned out to be, and how you reorder what you now know about yourself. And yes, being Swedish, the answers are as excruciating as you'd imagine.
2 comments:
Force Majeure has not one but two of my favorite scenes of the year: scenes that so perfectly encapsulate the themes of the film, the relationship between characters, the influence of setting, etc... The first is the key scene in the film, the catalyst for the central drama that throws an idyllic Swedish family into existential disarray. While sitting for lunch at a scenic patio restaurant with a stunning view of one of the mountains at a perfectly manicured ski resort in the French Alps, our perfectly constituted bourgeois family witnesses a "controlled avalanche" that rushes like the angry fist of God upon the unsuspecting vacationers. The mother's instincts are to protect her children, the father's instincts are to grab his iPhone and gloves and run for safety. The avalanche stops short of the restaurant, the family is enshrouded in a harmless white fog of mist, the lunch resumes, and the family is altered. This is certainly the most talked about scene in the film, and rightly so, both for its immediate embrace of "disaster film" imagery as well as its subsequent subversion of expected consequences (there is no bloodshed, or even broken glass, just some seriously distraught Swedes).
But the scene that will most stick with me, the scene that made me squirm in my seat and want to yell at the characters on screen to stop playing this selfish charade of a marriage and think about the safety of their kids, is the scene that immediately follows the avalanche. A medium close up on one of the cleaning staff at the hotel, a disheveled middle-aged man with a heavy face and an unassuming presence. He swipes his keycard against a hotel room door, one of hundreds of identical, immaculate entryways, and enters the room, vacuum in hand. The hall is empty for a split second, the camera shifts focus from the front of the frame to the back, where our family's mother has just entered the hall and is quickly walking towards us. We now know that the room that the janitor has just entered is the same room where the Swedish family is staying. The mother is walking with a purpose, clearly upset about her husband's abandonment of her and the kids. She is followed by her two children, struggling to keep up with her, as the husband brings up the rear, uncertain about what to make of his own response to the avalanche and nervous about his wife's response to him. The camera stays put, the family comes to us. At the door, the mom shuttles her kids into the hotel room. They want to talk to her, but the mom demands some time alone with their father. The kids open the door again in protest, the mom shuts it again, calm in her words but forceful in her actions. The kids open the door one more time, and this time we hear, "There's a man in the room." The mom, so focused on her own concerns, slams the door. We hear a loud thump, a body thrown against the inside of the door, and then all is quiet. For the next 30 seconds, as the father awkwardly tries to evade acknowledgment of his own cowardice and the mother tries to get him to at least admit to making a mistake, I was bugging out in my chair. Maybe I'm more afraid of what men and can do to children than I am of what avalanches can do to vacationers, but this scene was so tense and so absurd and so pointedly critical that I had trouble watching it. Of course, all is well at the end of the scene: the mother opens the door, the janitor bemusedly exits, with a sly, "Not much to clean up this time," and everyone is ok... Although a small scene, this really brought to the fore three themes central to this film: the incredible responsibility of parents to look after their children's safety; the impossibility of meeting that responsibility all of the time; and that focusing too much on what you need (by being unfaithful to your wife, cheating at cardgames with your kids, leaving your family to get crushed by an avalanche) or too little on what you need (sacrificing your entire being to the ideal of a father/husband that might not actually exist) is a surefire way to be a shitty parent.
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