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
