Force Majeure is streaming on Netflix currently. The Swedish movie set and filmed in the French Alps turns out to be related to the Walter Scott murder. Nobody gets killed in the movie (Europeans are somehow able to make compelling movies without people getting killed, paralyzed, etc.). However, there is an event with potentially serious consequences. The person who acts disgracefully has his own version but he is unable to maintain it in the face of mobile phone video footage.
[Separately the movie is yet more evidence that the best photographers are cinematographers. About half of the movie is essentially a series of beautifully composed photographs.]
Readers: Please stream this and let us know what you think!
I haven’t seen it yet, but Rotten Tomatoes says that 92% of critics liked it vs. 77% of the audience. I (perhaps because I have plebeian tastes) consider this an ominous sign. Usually I enjoy movies that the audience liked as much as more than the critics, rather than vice versa.
For example, I thought that the Imitation Game was great entertainment (despite how much of the history the film got utterly wrong) (89% critic rating / 92% audience rating) but The Immigrant (87% critic rating (almost as high as the Immigrant) / 61% audience rating, I found to be an unwatchable costume melodrama with cardboard cutout characters. They were both formulaic, but the pap tasted so good in the Imitation Game that you didn’t mind – it was like eating really good junk food. It’s junk and you know it, but it’s TASTY junk and that makes all the difference.
I watched this movie some 4 weeks ago (rented from my local public library).
My personal view of it is that it is slow moving, and like you said, half of the movie is scenery, long pauses in between dialogs, and long shots no-action (eating, sitting, etc.). But most of all, I found it to be odd in the way it is presenting the couples.
I found the movie odd because the driving event of the movie (the father running away from the family during an avalanche scare) is just out of place. Later, the wife speaking out about the event to strangers makes it even more odd. All this is done in such a calm dialog as if the couples have no friction between each other whatsoever. This does not reflect reality and thus why I found it to be odd.
Maybe Swedes do everything in a passive-aggressive way without letting it all hang out? Maybe you are from a more southerly/easterly ethnic background where the “airing of grievances” (loudly and sometimes publicly) is a more typical way of dealing with disagreements?
Watched this. I can’t recommend it. Very slow moving and the entire plot is basically about someone who acts dishonorably in a very stressful situation. I couldn’t get worked up, either way, about the way he behaved.
@Izzie, I have zero experience with Swedish society nor do I know anyone, do you? However, if this is how Swedish communicate during difficult times, and the movie is conveying it, than I want to move to Sweden in a heartbeat as it will be the calmest place on earth with zero infighting between couples.