Old Yorker

  • Force Majeure

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Turist

    Ruben Östlund (2014)

    The time is the present, the place a ski resort in the French Alps.  A Swedish couple in their mid-thirties are on a five-day holiday with their daughter and son.  On the second day, a controlled avalanche is less controlled than expected; the family, along with others lunching in a terrace restaurant, momentarily panic.  The husband and father, Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), tries to escape the avalanche without his wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), or their children, Vera and Harry (Clara and Vincent Wettergren).  Ebba is appalled by her husband’s instinctive, cowardly self-protection.  Matters are made worse by Tomas’s reluctance to admit to moving fast to save his own skin.  Over the next two days, the couple’s marriage plummets into crisis.  On their last night in the hotel, Tomas, overcome by shame (and self-pity), breaks down and has to be consoled by his wife and children.  The next morning, the family go skiing together.  Ebba disappears in a fog and Tomas leaves Vera and Harry to find her.  He succeeds and returns, with his wife (who’s physically unscathed), to where the children have waited.  This may be a moment of redemption for the paterfamilias (in his eyes anyway) but the family’s departure from the resort throws things off balance again.  They and their fellow tourists are driven in a coach along steeply winding mountain roads, which the driver struggles to negotiate.  Ebba is convinced that he is incompetent and insists on getting out of the vehicle.  All but one of the other passengers follow suit.

    When the passengers leave the coach, they have no option but to continue their journey on foot.  We see them filing down the mountain slope and, in the final shot of the film, walking towards the camera.  Although the angles are very different, these closing images bring to mind the famous, repeated shot in Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie that shows the six principal characters walking along a road – serenely impervious to the succession of setbacks they suffer in their quest for a satisfying meal.  In contrast, the affluent middle-class characters in Force Majeure experience a succession of crises of confidence.   They have a strong sense of entitlement, an expectation that the structures and technologies of their world will run like clockwork to guarantee their pleasures.  (Until the avalanche gets too close, the tourists are excitedly taking pictures of it on their phones.)  The writer-director Ruben Östlund, whose fourth feature this is, is out to demonstrate the fragility of their complacencies.

    Östlund accomplishes his aim confidently but obviously.  At the start of the film, the explosions that are regularly detonated in the beautiful Alpine landscape, to manage snowfall through controlled avalanches, are ominous.  There are other discomfiting noises on the soundtrack:  the grinding and moaning of mountain machinery contrast with the spare, spotless (and soulless) elegance of the hotel where the family are staying.  There’s a lift-to-the-scaffold quality to their journeys up to the ski slopes; the transport conveying them there not only creaks but is claustrophobic.  The articulation of marital fissures with disturbances in the natural world and strain in the ski resort’s mechanical substructure is confirmed as soon as Tomas’s and Ebba’s relationship starts to founder.  But Östlund keeps repeating the point and the sights and sounds of breakdown turn into no more than showing off his cleverness – even though the gaze of his camera is so transfixed by the snow and the hotel interiors (the place resembles, more and more, a luxury prison) that the viewer too is nearly hypnotised by these images, which are typically held for what feels like a long time.

    The moment of the avalanche is pivotal rather as the Marabar Caves episode is in A Passage to India.   These crucial incidents are, in a sense, non-events:  Dr Aziz doesn’t assault Adela Quested and the avalanche in Force Majeure doesn’t cause any physical damage.   One obvious difference between the two narrative turning points is that we have only Adela Quested’s word for what happens in the Marabar Caves whereas Ebba has photographic evidence of Tomas’s evasive action.  A larger and more important difference is in how convincingly the storyteller relates the pivotal event to what has gone before.  Adela’s claim that Aziz behaved improperly towards her in the caves is persuasive as a neurotic consequence of earlier, minor incidents which E M Forster includes to show that, as she attempts to engage with Indian landscape and culture, Adela Quested is increasingly unnerved.  Most reviews I’ve read of Force Majeure suggest that Tomas’s brief desertion of his family is a bolt from the blue – that it’s the unexpectedness of her husband’s contemptible selfishness that floors Ebba.  The marital situation isn’t as simple as this, though.  A structural and dramatic weakness of the film is that Ruben Östlund wants to have it both ways.

    Östlund sets things up from the start to suggest that Tomas, a businessman, spends too much time at work and not enough with his family.  On their arrival at the hotel, Ebba tells another guest that they need, and Tomas particularly needs, a holiday.  Her husband jokes, but with a hint of irritation, that he’s been told he’s going to enjoy the next five days.  As played by Johannes Kuhnke, Tomas exudes self-satisfaction:  it’s clear, well before the avalanche, he must be made to see the error of his egocentric ways.  What’s also striking in the early scenes of Force Majeure is that Tomas’s and Ebba’s kids, whenever they’re not absorbed in their iPads or are asleep, are brittle and obstreperous with their parents.  This is particularly the case with Harry, the younger child.  One of the strongest moments of the film arrives when Tomas, exasperated by his son’s behaviour, asks what’s wrong and Harry blurts out that he’s worried his parents are going to divorce.  It’s true that this exchange takes place on the morning of Day 3 (the film is divided into five daily chapters), after the avalanche incident, but Harry was fractious from the start and he can’t possibly have developed fears about the family breaking up solely on the strength of Ebba’s reaction so far to the events of the previous day (a reaction which is partly suppressed).

    When Tomas breaks down and lies weeping on the floor of their hotel room, Vera and Harry join Ebba in embracing and comforting him; their mother tells the puzzled, anxious children that their father is ‘sad’ and her explanation is mutely accepted.   By this stage, Vera and Harry have stopped being troublesome because it would get in Ruben Östlund’s way if they still were.  There’s no reiteration by Harry of the fears he expressed on Day 3, nor any mention, on the morning of Day 5, of Tomas’s breakdown the previous night – the children show no concern or curiosity about whether their father’s prostrating ‘sadness’ has passed.  Ostlund is, in both senses of the word, careless about the human realities of the family’s situation.  He’s preoccupied with arresting tableaux vivants – illustrations of the dismantling of the characters’ sense of security.

    I’d expected the film, in view of its reception as a red-hot-ice-cold comedy of manners, to be more amusing than it is:  its admirers seem to confuse Östlund’s sardonic attitude with a comic gift.  There’s a good punchline to the sequences involving a hotel worker (Johannes Moustos), who looks vaguely Eastern European, and who unsettles Tomas and Ebba.  The man observes their arguments in the corridor outside their room (so that the children inside don’t hear) and Tomas tells him at one point to stop spying on them.  The last time this man appears, Ebba has to ask for his help:  she and her husband have mislaid the swipe card for their room and Tomas has become a quivering, weeping wreck.  Force Majeure is substantially funny, though, only when Mats (Kristofer Hivju), an old friend of the main couple, arrives at the resort, with his much younger girlfriend, Fanni (Fanni Metelius).  He joins Tomas and Ebba for what, in spite of Mats’s attempts to defuse the situation (it’s Day 3), becomes an increasingly uncomfortable evening.  On the way back to their own room in the hotel, Fanni tells Mats that she would have expected him to run for cover, as Tomas did, when the avalanche threatened.  She doesn’t say this to start an argument but her remark gives Mats a sleepless night and he therefore ensures that Fanni has one too.  This episode works partly because you wonder briefly if Östlund is going to create a comic epidemic of male-female discord among the hotel guests (he doesn’t) and partly because Kristofer Hivju is, by some way, the strongest screen presence and the most likeable performer in the film.

    While deriding the privileged vulnerability of his characters generally, Östlund also has a more specific satiric focus, on male vanities and expectations of ‘manhood’.  Mats is insulted by Fanni’s aspersions of cowardice.  Tomas’s deepening depression is lifted when two young women tell him he’s the most attractive man staying at the hotel but it’s a short-lived respite:  the women then apologise to him – they were confusing Tomas with someone else.  The female lead in last year’s Winter Sleep was, like Ebba, a wife on the receiving end of her husband’s self-centredness and this element of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film was weakened by the limited performance of the actress concerned.  The same thing happens here.  Ebba is meant to be sympathetic, at least compared with Tomas, but the beautifully woebegone Lisa Loven Kongsli plays her monotonously.  A more interesting female character is Charlotte (Karin Myrenberg), another guest at the hotel, who shocks Ebba when she explains that, although she’s married, she continues to enjoy various relationships, short-term and long-term, with other men.  In the finale to Force Majeure, Charlotte is the one passenger who stays on the coach, with the driver.

    16 April 2015

  • Jauja

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lisandro Alonso  (2014)

    Early bird shows are so sparsely attended that lunchtime cinema visits are starting to remind me of Larkin’s Church Going – in particular, the poet’s wondering:

    ‘When churches fall completely out of use

    What we shall turn them into …’

    Curzon cinemas are being turned into chill-out centres.  When you book online at most of the London Curzons now, you get an e-ticket proclaiming ‘Next stop the bar!’ – as if the film you’re going to see is the pretext for a drink.   It may be different in the evening at Curzon Soho (although it wasn’t that different when I used to go there after work) but there are usually more bums on seats in the refreshment areas – people meeting other people or communing with their phones or tablets – than in the theatres.  The Renoir in Russell Square’s Brunswick Centre has now been extensively refurbished and re-launched as Curzon Bloomsbury:  on my first visit there late last month the social spaces were well populated but I was one of only three people watching Jauja.

    The screens at Curzon Bloomsbury include the Bertha Dochouse which, according to its website, is ‘the UK’s first cinema dedicated solely to documentary films and events’ – so the first mystery of Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja is why it was being shown in the Dochouse.  The second mystery is the elevated position of the picture in the Sight and Sound films-of-the-year chart for 2014 – joint ninth, with Ida.  (Jauja also won the FIPRESCI prize in the ‘Un Certain Regard’ section of last year’s Cannes festival.)  Of course, neither of these things is really a mystery, or even a surprise.   The pandemic carelessness of outfits like Curzon and BFI explains the first (administrative competence is considered philistine).  And it’s a safe bet that many professional cineastes will be impressed by Alonso’s film.  Jauja currently has a 91% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes although the critics’ consensus summary at least carries a helpful warning:  ‘Jauja will prove haunting for those lured in by its deliberate pace and lovely visuals, though it may test some viewers’ patience’.

    Lisandro Alonso is Argentinian, Jauja‘s star, Viggo Mortensen, is Danish, and the dialogue, by Alonso and Fabian Casas, is spoken in both Danish and Spanish.   Most of the story takes place in the second half of the nineteenth century, in South American terrain almost as deserted as the Bertha Dochouse.  There’s a relatively short epilogue in what appears to be present-day Denmark.  But stating time and place so baldly misrepresents the intentional elusiveness of the film:  according to the IMDB plot synopsis, ‘A father and daughter journey from Denmark to an unknown desert that exists in a realm beyond the confines of civilization’.  The father (Mortensen) is Captain Gunnar Dinesen, a military officer and engineer who is working with the Argentine army in the settlement of Patagonia and in conflict with the indigenous people of the area.  The daughter is fifteen year old Ingeborg (Viilbjork Malling Agger), whom her father has, for reasons unclear, brought along with him.  Jauja is an actual place and was the capital of Spanish Peru prior to the founding of Lima:  Wikipedia explains that the Spanish expression ‘país de Jauja’, literally ‘country of Jauja’, is used figuratively to mean ‘never never land’ or ‘land of milk and honey’.  Legends on the screen at the start of the film describe Jauja as an alleged utopia that people kept trying to find but never did – they always lost their way en route.

    Jauja begins with a conversation between Dinesen and Ingeborg, who says she would very much like a dog and asks her father why she can’t have one.  He replies by first asking what sort of dog she would like.  After a pause (the first of many), she gives her answer.  She doesn’t want, for example, a big dog or a brown dog or a friendly dog or a Pomeranian; she wants a dog ‘that will follow me everywhere’.  Dinesen promises she’ll have one when they return to Denmark.  It’s pretty clear this conversation will prove to be significant in what follows and, as a piece of writing, it certainly anticipates later exchanges in Jauja:  there isn’t a huge amount of dialogue but, when the characters do speak, they can’t resist speaking fancy.  Ingeborg runs away with Porto (Diego Roman), a young Argentine soldier.  Peeling back his shirt as they prepare to make love, she is fascinated by a mark on Porto’s shoulder and asks if it hurts.  He tells her it’s a birthmark, to which Ingeborg replies, ‘It’s like a constellation … or a falling star’.  You realise it’s a Cloud Atlas-type birthmark (the one in Cloud Atlas was comet-shaped) even before Ingeborg tells Porto, ‘I feel we know each other from another time’, or words to that effect.  Porto is murdered – mortally wounded by the brutal local warlord Zuluaga (Gabriel Marquez) and finished off by the distraught Dinesen, who thinks the soldier has done away with his daughter.  During his increasingly despairing and eventually fruitless search for Ingeborg, Dinesen encounters an Irish wolfhound wandering around a barren, rocky hillside.  On its shoulder, the dog has a sore (probably in the shape of Sirius).  The animal leads Dinesen to ‘Woman in the cave’, as she’s listed in the IMDB cast.  The woman (Ghita Norby) asks Dinesen about his past life.  He tells her that his wife left him and his daughter, when Ingeborg was a young child.  The woman asks what the wife was like and Dinesen describes her as ‘… quite tall – and beautiful’.  You hope he might leave it at that but you hope in vain.  His wife, he goes on, was ‘… achingly beautiful – like a carnivorous plant that comes out only at night, focusing all its energy on the insect it would devour’.

    I’m making a sarcastic meal of the dialogue and I realise that admirers of Jauja regard the words Alonso has written as unimportant beside the images that he and his DoP Timo Salminen have created.  I gather that Alonso’s previous movies have been virtually wordless and think Jauja, his sixth feature, would have been a stronger film if it too had kept schtum.  Although I suspect the meanings of Alonso’s images are very limited, there’s no denying that he and Salminen bring out of the landscape a remarkable variety of textures.   But the clumsy language that the characters speak, by giving the metaphysical game away, detracts from the mysterious possibilities of the visuals – and, since there is dialogue, how can it be ignored?  Jauja is slow cinema, which means, for example, that you can drop off while Dinesen is approaching on horseback from the back of the frame and come to again even before he’s reached the foreground.  When his horse is stolen, it therefore raises the prospect of even slower cinema:  it’s a relief that, from this point onwards, Alonso largely abandons the device of protracted progress from the background.  But he sometimes uses the reverse journey – man and horse recede into the far distance.  Human beings pass through this harsh, indifferent country and, when they disappear, nature continues unaltered by their transient presence in it.  We get the point – repeatedly.  This is an example of what I mean by the limited meanings of the images but, by holding a shot for several minutes, Alonso encourages the viewer to think there must be much to see in it.

    Following Catch Me Daddy, this is the second drama to be released in Britain within the last couple of months with a storyline inspired by The Searchers – although, for this filmgoer (and in spite of Dinesen’s being a not unusual Danish name), the inflexible European protagonist’s travails in an alien land brought to mind not John Ford but Karen Blixen’s nom de plume and Out of Africa.  Viggo Mortensen is much more agreeable company than John Wayne in The Searchers but there were times in Jauja when I had to keep myself amused by imagining how Wayne would have reacted to the increasingly surreal happenings in Alonso’s film.  (‘What the hell!?’ … in fact, that is what Mortensen says when he comes across the wolfhound with the wounded shoulder.)  Although the move from existential landscape into existential dialogue is a mistake and Ghita Norby, in her hat and wig, looks dressed up to be a character in a movie, I enjoyed Dinesen’s meeting with cave-woman.  Norby not only livens things up briefly; she also supplies Viggo Mortensen, for nearly the only time in Jauja, with someone to play off.  And some of what Dinesen says at this point – when he seems to confuse the identities of the old woman and his daughter – is more interesting than the rest.  The meshing of realistic and oneiric aspects of the story works in this instance.  (Alone and deprived of food and water for some time, Dinesen would likely become mentally disoriented.)   I’m not sure how Dinesen’s presence and quest in Patagonia connect with the film’s opening definition of Jauja – how the process of trying to find his daughter corresponds to the search for a ‘never-never land’.  Unless, that is, the father in this relationship is the one who wants his child not to grow up (he’s more likely the dog that follows her everywhere).  Ingeborg is the only woman in evidence most of the time and there’s an early sequence in which Pittaluga (Adrian Fondari), an Argentinian solider older and more boorish than Porto, is shown bathing in a pond and masturbating as he does so.  The suspicious eye observing this, from a distance, is Dinesen’s:  one assumes, at least in retrospect, that Pittaluga is fantasising about Ingeborg – or at least that Dinesen thinks he is.  When she disappears, her father believes that she’s been abducted.  In fact, she deserts Dinesen of her own accord to go off with the younger soldier.

    The last part of Jauja sees the young actress who plays Ingeborg waking in a bed.  She’s wearing the night clothes of a twenty-first century teenager.  Was all the stuff in Patagonia this Danish girl’s dream – or is she a reincarnation of Ingeborg or at least a descendant of Dinesen?   Her father, we learn, is currently away from home.  The only other person in evidence in the grounds of the place is a man who looks after the girl’s several Irish wolfhounds.  It comes as no surprise that one of the dogs has the same open wound as its human and canine precursors in the Patagonian story although the dog handler (Brian Patterson) says the animal’s shoulder is responding well to medication.  Having let the injured dog wander off (why?), the girl notices in the grass a little toy soldier – the same object Dinesen came upon, after Porto’s death, during his fruitless search for Ingeborg.  By now, the characters have very little to say and, as a result, Alonso is able to revive somewhat the film’s sense of mystery.  Like A O Scott in his New York Times review, I noticed the ‘rounded-off corners of the almost-square frames’ that Alonso favours.  Scott is right to say that these ‘evoke early movies and antique photographs’ but doesn’t suggest how this effect links with anything else in the film.  Plenty of intelligent people, when they don’t understand something, are nervous of deriding it and anxious to spot whatever they can that might suggest they did understand.  Jauja is a good example of the phenomenon.

    23 April 2015

     

     

     

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