Culture

Rating: 5/5

Force Majeure follows a Swedish family on their five-day skiing holiday. The opening scene shows the family being persuaded by a photographer to have their picture taken. The result is a funny moment where you can see how they have constructed an ideal family: mother, father, daughter and son — they’re all beautiful and they all look perfect in the snow; it’s a perfect balance.

What unfolds over the course of the film is a conflict between the mother, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and the father, Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke). The conflict between the parents influences the reactions of the children, and of all four of them as a family. When an avalanche looks as though it’s about to hit the family while they’re at an outdoor restaurant, Tomas tells the family not to worry. When the avalanche quickly approaches, everyone at the restaurant freaks out and tries to run away. Tomas grabs his phone and runs for his life, leaving behind Ebba and his two children. However, it turns out that it was just fog from the controlled avalanche. The clincher is that Tomas refuses to admit that he ran away.

The beautiful thing about this movie is that it addresses ideas and issues around femininity, masculinity and gender expectations without ever feeling like it is actively doing so. It explores family life without appearing to pick a “right way” of doing it. Yes, Tomas is a dick, but eventually you end up relating to him — he freaked out, ran away, and he was emasculated by that.

Force Majeure is darkly funny; you can’t help but laugh at the ridiculous nature of what unfolds for this picture-perfect family. The score is spot on, and the film uses the absence of sound effectively to create tension. There are lots of beautiful and intimate scenes with the family — the kind of scenes that wouldn’t make it into a Hollywood movie.