Review of Force Majeure (2014) by Bill P — 24 Apr 2015

Well you can't fault the actors, they're the tops throughout. The photography is stunning, and knitted into the fabric of the screenplay. The psychological observation is acute - for example the two supporting actors, a red bearded Viking of a forty year old and his blonde twenty year old girlfriend stay up half the night because he just can't let go of the fact that she says yes she could see him behaving like Tomas. It picks up, hammers home, that it is people's perceptions of you that matter - and the nearer and dearer they are, the more it matters and the less easy things are to unsay. There's lots of sly humour as well - the scene just mentioned is full of it. Slightly more uneasy in its skin, the middle-aged janitor/cleaner/caretaker who witnesses our hero couple's various arguments and breakdowns in the hotel is a figure apart, an uncomfortable below stairs character in this very luxurious ski hotel. So people chuckle and laugh occasionally - at this dour underling and his impassive watching a middle class meltdown. There are some off the wall set pieces - sitting in a mountain side bar when a young woman approaches them, and almost slap stick comedy of manners a la Eric Rohmer occurs.

Overall though the word is uncomfortable. The women come out of it better than the men - the men lie , cheat, escape without thinking of others - theirs is a litany of failure, the worst it seems being their inability to talk about it on one hand, or their inability to let go of the subject once broached. A bit of a no-win situation, which is why , I think, I found the film sooo depressing . One of those films where my objective assessment of its many many merits was outweighed by my personal reaction - the male ego is very fragile. And every so often, even in a review, the personal has to come to the fore - but then as my wife did say "Get over it".