Review of Force Majeure (2014) by Davey M — 25 Dec 2014

Amidst the menace of the snow and ice, tourists at a ski resort kid themselves that they are in control of the elements. Amidst the (literal and figurative) avalanche of their crumbling marriage, Ebba and Tomas convince themselves that little things are large and larger things are little, that they are something more than animals with genetically hardwired predispositions, that they can rise above the prescriptions and proscriptions afforded by their gender identity, by patriarchy, by nuclear families, by the Scandinavian bourgeoisie.

While the black Norwegian humor really only struck me as funny in a couple of scenes (awkward humor tends to be one of my least favorite forms of humor, and the whole movie is sort of predicated on it), I still admired the dickens out of FORCE MAJEURE as a textbook example of how to tell a story through the mis-en-scene, which it does more simply, more clearly, more elegantly than anything I've seen in a good long while.