A marriage on the precipice

You’re sitting at lunch with your spouse and two children. It’s a gorgeous skiing holiday at a wondrous chateau atop the French Alps. The holiday is long overdue to reconnect as work has taken much time away from each other.

A controlled avalanche on the mountainside facing the balcony seems to go wild, and snow crashes into the diners, causing panic and chaos … a terrifying scene of fear and survival.

For Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and her husband Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), the moment also serves to highlight a fundamental problem in their marriage. During that traumatic moment, she goes into the mode of protecting the children, Vera (Clara Wettergren) and Harry (Vincent Wettergren) while Tomas grabs his cellphone and runs, leaving the others behind him.

The disaster turns out to be harmless physically: the smoke of the explosion clearing away in the gentle breeze. While Ebba reassures the children, Tomas returns to the table with the rift in the relationship evident to all but him.

That scene happens 10 minutes in to Force Majeure, a brilliant and beautifully understated Swedish movie (with English subtitles) that examines one couple’s relationship and the single definable point that could dissolve it entirely. A force majeure, by the way, means both a powerful force – such as an avalanche – and an unpredictable occurrence that can disrupt a contract. When that snow tumbled down the mountainside, Ebba and Tomas’ marriage lay at the bottom waiting to either be buried or to survive the disaster and become stronger for it.

In grand Swedish style, Ruben östlund’s deft script and directing plays like a modernized take on Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. This is a real life tragedy told with stark, telling truths. Tomas is a workaholic: a man who can’t put his phone down even during a much-needed vacation. The scenery of the Alps demonstrates the insidious nature of his need to stay connected through technology while sacrificing the real connections of his family members. The mountains are astoundingly serene, yet blinking lights from the hotel pierce through the atmosphere. Everyone is reminded that

Ebba, on the other hand, takes the moment to reflect on the strength of their marital union, wondering if she has been deluded about her husband and his commitment to their relationship. She can’t help but blurt out his selfishness to friends during otherwise superficial social occasions. Watching her struggle to reconcile is difficult, and it’s made even more so by Tomas’ flat out refusal to acknowledge her version of the events. He plays the game of ‘he said, she said’ despite the evidence – including video playback of the avalanche from his own phone – that has mounted to support his wife.

Clearly, this is a couple in need of some counselling. Force Majeure is a wonderfully smart movie with convincing characters in one of those real life situations that are so tough to fake on screen. Watching this with your significant other is a smart move too as it could serve as its own form of couples therapy by proxy. At the very least, it offers great material for an important conversation on how you and your partner can resolve major conflicts such as this one.