Masculinity in crisis? Plus jokes? Force Majeure is just for you
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Version 0 of 1. It is a disaster movie on an epic scale but not as we know it. No earthquakes, landslides or biblical floods. Just two people, man and wife – Tomas, rich, successful and his beautiful spouse, Ebba – on a five-day skiing holiday with their young children, Vera and Harry. They have the looks, the income and the upmarket kit. The groans and creaks of machinery that sweeps the skiers up the towering mountains, the regular cannon explosions that attempt to keep avalanches under control flag up that everything – life, holiday, relationship – appears to be in good working order. What could possibly go wrong? Force majeure is a legal term that relates to an act of God freeing both parties from a contract. In the extraordinary film of the same name by the Swede Ruben Östlund, it is also the white force that, on day two of the holiday during a meal on a restaurant terrace, descends with terrifying speed on the family. Is it a controlled avalanche or a case of every man for himself? Tomas grabs his iPhone and runs. Ebba reaches protectively for the children. What then unfolds is a searing satirical examination of what happens when a man loses face and of the impact it has on his family. In particular on his wife, a woman who has, perhaps, been complicit in keeping this traditional partnership in place for old-fashioned bourgeois reasons, security and income, until events rip up the contract. Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall but can anything put him, and her, back together again? “I don’t recognise you. I don’t recognise myself,” Ebba says. After fleeing, Tomas returns to the table as if nothing has happened. This is near the start of the film; I won’t reveal too much of what follows. But later in the holiday, when a friend, Mats, arrives – divorced and middle-aged with his 20-year-old girlfriend – we know, and the girlfriend knows, that this is another man of delusions. The film allows him, too, to display his chronic sense of inadequacy and his preoccupation with being seen as a “real man”. The film is a feminist dissection of modern masculinity conducted by a man – with laughs. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger writes: “Men act, women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” In Force Majeure, the roles are switched. Östlund is a natural with the female gaze. Ebba observes as the power of her husband dissolves into a puddle of tears. For Ebba and Tomas and the increasingly distressed children, au fait with divorce, nothing is as it was – or is it? That is the scale of the catastrophe – there is no hero. |