Review of Force Majeure (2014) by Patrick D — 18 Apr 2015

A very good movie, but not, by far, a comedy. It is a very serious matter: what would the father and husband WE are, or the male partner WE live with, actually do in a similar situation? We want to believe that THIS man we live with, perhaps permanently, would be a natural hero, but can we be sure? After all, he has not ben tested often enough in this hyper-civilized world of ours, where masculinity gets ritualized and ridiculed rather than practiced (unless you naively think sex is what really matters). The story is impeccably told, with the children acting as beacons of emotional necessity (not the same as emotional truth), while friends mirror the desperate struggle for adult self-fashioning. Only the final scene on the bus is superfluous, as it detracts from one of the film's key moments just before that, one that reveals that THIS wife is a Conradian heroine.

Although we may often laugh, nervously, the film works because it is often embarrassing.