Force Majeure (2014)

FORCE MAJEURE  (2014)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Ruben Östlund
    Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, 
    Kristofer Hivju, Fanni Metelius, Vincent Wettergren, 
    Clara Wettergren, Karin Myrenberg, Brady Corbet
This starts out with an apparently happy Swedish family on an idyllic skiing holiday in the French Alps. Tomas and Ebba are fortyish and attractive. Their kids, a boy and a girl, are blond and beautiful. Their first day out, they're having lunch together on the deck of one of those improbable restaurants high in the mountains, when there's an avalanche, which they narrowly escape. After that, fissures begin to appear in Tomas and Ebba's relationship, and as the holiday goes on, the cracks, like what happens when a pebble nicks your windshield, get bigger and deeper and more pervasive and harder to repair. The acting in this is quite good, and the skiing scenes are spectacular. But I found myself wishing the filmmakers could've found a more cinematic way of telling their story than by having the characters sit around and talk it to death. There's an awkwardness to some of those scenes that's real enough to make you uncomfortable, but the emotional stakes are relatively low. Will Tomas and Ebba go on together? It's hard to say. And to tell the truth, it's hard to care. There are a number of points in the last half hour where the movie could've ended, all of them ambiguous, and the ending, when it does come, doesn't resolve much of anything, either.