I just
watched a Swedish sub-titled film called “Force Majeure.” (BTW, an acquaintance
tells me the film is titled “Snow Therapy” in France) The crazy thing is that
it’s listed on IMDb as a comedy-drama. I get the drama part. And yeah,
if you like to laugh at other people’s relationship problems you might get a
few chuckles out of it.
Uncomfortable
moments are always funny. That would be
all though; it’s not laughing out loud funny. You’ve have to be borderline
psychotic to double over in laughter at the unraveling relationship of Ebba and
her husband Tomas.
The style of
“Force Majeure” is minimalist, objective, and realistic. Characters don’t make
speeches that move the plot. Communication between Ebba and Tomas is broken,
often interrupted as life with children is. There are abrupt and jarring jumps
between scenes alternating between majestic mountains and the daily round of
necessary human activity.
You see much brushing of teeth. You see a
little boy’s difficulty in taking a pee after peeling off layers of winter
clothing. You see a mom squatting in a
grove of fir trees on the mountain doing the same. You see the family sleeping
four abed, the children irritable and sensitive to their parents’ anxieties. Yeah, and there’s a lot of snow. In fact, there are constant explosions reverberating
in the night as the caretakers detonate dynamite to lesson the chance of
avalanches.
Okay so the
story is about a married couple on vocation at a chic ski
resort in the Alps. They have two
beautiful blonde children, a boy maybe six, a girl maybe eight. Parents are
attractive with middle-class sensibilities and interests. After a day of skiing, they’re at a
restaurant overlooking the mountain. Suddenly, and with muffled dynamite blasts
in the distance, a mountain of snow begins rolling down the mountain toward the
outdoor restaurant where people are dining and drinking.
The panic is
comprehensible your next thought it is that film is too predictable. It’s
not, though. The avalanche stops at the resort’s edge. Even so, the diners are lost
in a snowy fog, shepherding their children, and in Ebba’s case looking for her
husband.
That
introduces the plot. With this clear and
present danger of avalanche, the husband has fled, leaving the wife to shelter
the children. Ebba first takes it in stride,
doesn’t make a big deal of it. Yet it irks her. Until this wall of snow threatened
to crush them, she felt safe, safe with her handsome charming husband.
Ebba’s
thinking the male should be a protector of the species. It’s a kind of
unwritten law which goes all the way back to the cave man era. However, now she’s
thinking her husband is a coward. ‘Wow I have two kids with this man and he
ran when the snow came down.’ Can she ever feel safe with him?
I think all
couples of longstanding relationships have experienced what comes next. You’re in the company of friends, maybe
having dinner together, a few drinks at the local pub, a coffee klatsch. Something or other. Your wife/partner/sig-other/whatever is of
course telling the story of the near crushing avalanche. And horror of horrors, she tells the guest
how you ran off and left her with the children.
She’s telling it in a matter-of-fact way, not at all vindictive, with a
look of mild disappointment.
But you’re a
man, see, and men are supposed to take care of women and children. So the
husband takes issue. He tells the story in a different way. Ebba says ‘no it
wasn’t that way.’ It goes on. The guests become uncomfortable in the extreme. They try to change the subject but neither
Ebba nor her husband Tomas will let it alone.
I point out
this happens with a thoroughly modern couple, not a couple of stranded Neanderthals
from the Ice Age. Buried, repressed, mocked or scorned, the male ego is built
on the bedrock of masculinity and, in the eyes of others, is expected.
I hope I
didn’t say too much. It’s a film worth watching even if I did. There’s much about the film I did not say.
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