Butler's Cinema Scene

“FORCE MAJEURE”  My rating: B

118 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Most of us would like to believe that if faced with a life-threatening crisis we would behave decently, nobly…even heroically.

Uh, probably not.  Most of us would be like Tomas, the husband and father whose act of cowardice becomes the topic of Ruben Ostlund’s terse, psychologically ravaging “Force Majeure.”

The Swedish Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) has brought his wife Ebba (Lisa Kongsli) and two young children to posh ski resort in the French Alps.  They appear to be an utterly unremarkable young family.

But while eating lunch at an outdoor cafe, they witness a controlled avalanche set off by explosive detonations.  The churning wall of white speeds down a mountainside, hits the bottom of a valley, then begins rapidly climbing toward the terrace on which the diners are sitting.

“Doesn’t look controlled to me,” Ebba says.

Result: chaos.  People scream, run, freak out.  Ebba grabs her two children and hunkers down behind a table.  Tomas cuts and runs, returning to his loved ones only when it becomes clear that the snow never came close to the restaurant, that a cloud of white fog only made it appear that everyone was about to be buried alive.

Johannes Kuhnke and Lisa Kongsli (center) and kids

Initially Tomas and Ebba are simply relieved to  return to their hotel room in one piece.

But with the passage of hours, Ebba becomes obsessed with getting Tomas to admit to his cowardice.  He squirms and equivocates, maintaining that the positive outcome is all that matters.

But Ebba won’t let up. She brings up her husband’s behavior in front of other hotel guests, especially Tomas’ best friend Mats (Kristofer Hivju), a divorced bearded Viking who has shown up with a new girlfriend half his age.

Ebba forces Tomas to replay for his friend his cell phone video of the incident, which proves without a doubt that the husband and father abandoned his family in a moment of perceived danger. Mats tries to rationalize Tomas’ behavior as part of a survival instinct that overrules all other feelings.

Forced to face his own cowardice, Tomas breaks down into a sobbing lump of misery, upping the general angst and anxiety by tearfully admitting to extramarital affairs Ebba had no inkling of.

Just another ho-hum family vacation.

“Force Majeure” (in legal terms, an act of God) hovers somewhere between straight drama and very bitter comedy.  Not that you’ll laugh much.  The situation is too unsettling for that. But in its realistic depiction of relationship dynamics and personal guilt,  writer/director Ostlund forces all of us to face our own battling inclinations — risk all by staying and helping, or cut and run?

| Robert W. Butler