Force majeure

Force Majeure attempts to find deep meaning in a husband's failed response to a sudden crisis. A family's routine ski trip is thrown into turmoil when he responds poorly to an apparent avalanche. The movie is largely a character study of the aftermath. The problem is that it is one of those movies with virtually no sympathetic characters. As such it's a bit of a difficult watch. It is hard to join the movie in its search for meaning, when the main characters are so alienating and off-putting. Even the kids in the family aren't particularly sympathetic. Further, the movie attempts to wring way too much melodrama out of a relatively minor incident. For me it was more tiresome than enlightening. Finally, I thought some of the plot devices were amateurish; too many plot twists depended on cell phones not working. While I appreciated the film's ambition, it did not work for me.

'FORCE MAJEURE': Four Stars (Out of Five)

Swedish drama flick about a family on holiday in the French Alps, who survive an avalanche; which then puts the father's courage, and family value, in question (as he abandoned his family to save himself). The film was written and directed by Ruben Ostlund and stars Johannes Kuhnke and Lisa Loven Kongsli. It's one of the most critically acclaimed movies of 2014 and was nominated for a Golden Globe; for Best Foreign Language Film. I found it to be a pretty interesting and dramatically intense character study.

The film tells the story of a Swedish family vacationing in the French Alps. One day, during lunch at a beautiful mountainside restaurant, the family is hit by an avalanche, along with other restaurant customers. Everyone is safe but it becomes apparent to the wife, Ebba (Kongsli), that her husband, Tomas (Kuhnke), had fled the scene by himself; leaving the family to fend for themselves. This really bothers Ebba, who proceeds to harass Tomas about it, for the rest of their ski trip. Tomas tries to deny his cowardly actions ever took place, as he lets the event eat him up inside.

The movie kind of deals with everyone's worst fears; 'how would you react in a traumatic life threatening situation?', 'would you be the heroic person you would want to be?'. These are fears that have haunted me, at times. I think I'd be brave, and do the right thing, but no one really knows for sure; until they're in that situation. The film is pretty insightful in that way and it's also very disturbing. The harassment, from the wife, makes the film feel very disheartening. There is a twist ending, as well, that provides a little more emotional satisfaction for everyone. It's a well made drama film, but pretty hard to sit through.

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This was billed as "wickedly funny" and a "dark comedy" but I never laughed once. It's not a terrible movie, but it is decidedly not funny. It's borderline depressing much of the time to be honest.

I knew nothing about Ruben Östlund's "Turist" ("Force Majeure" in English) when I started watching it, so that made it more intense. I interpreted the movie as a look at instances when people suppress unpleasant things, only to see dangerous situations force them to face reality. The approaching avalanche foretells the repressed issues that the family will have to address, and the question of how to flee a dangerous place functions as a good plot device.

We often stereotype Scandinavian movies as slow, and this is no exception. But mind you, the slow pace allows the story and the characters to thoroughly develop, and the music really sets the stage. The alpine setting may look pristine and idealistic, but what transpires over the course of the movie is nothing of the sort.

I recommend it.

I have to say that at the end of the movie, I ended is a mild state of shock that lasted at least 20 minutes before I could start to assimilate the content of the movie. Visually the movie is well executed, the sceneries are not complex but the shots fit perfectly the situations that happen along the movie.

About the movie as a whole, I could say that you could easily write a book about it, is so full of different things like human emotions, psychological collapses, marriage problems, bizarre situations, funny scenes that could produce so many different reactions on people, the nature of the female and male towards protecting others... I could go on and on and on. I think that at the end of the movie the viewers will have a lot to talk about.

If you are a passionate and curious person and you take the decision to see this movie, be patient and enjoy it from the beginning to the end without interruptions.