FORCE MAJEURE
SLIPPERY SLOPE
It might have been passed up for an Oscar nod, but Swedish fi lm Force Majeure made its own news on nominations day. Yasmin Sulaiman caught up with director Ruben Östlund about YouTube, the ‘worst man cry’ and our
unshakeable survival instinct
I f you’ve seen the YouTube video of Ruben Östlund’s reaction when his latest i lm wasn’t nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, you’ll go some way towards understanding the offbeat humour of Force Majeure. In the video, the Swedish director and his producer Erik Hemmendorff i lm themselves watching the live nominations. When they learn that the i lm has missed out, Östlund wanders off-screen: all we hear is a loud, inhuman cry and Hemmendorff beseeching him, ‘don’t undress!’
‘A lot of people have asked me if it’s fake,’ laughs Östlund when we chat at The Hospitali eld Club in London’s Covent Garden. ‘And, errr, I won’t tell.’ Set in a ski resort in the Alps, Force Majeure pivots around a single, split-second reaction. Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and their two children are enjoying a family holiday; as they eat at an outdoor terrace restaurant, a controlled avalanche looks like it’s coming too close. Ebba grabs her children and shelters them. Tomas, meanwhile, pockets his mobile phone and runs away.
‘I saw a YouTube clip of a group of tourists sitting in an outdoor restaurant high up in the mountains and watching an avalanche tumbling down a mountainside,’ explains Östlund, who started out making skiing i lms before he went to i lm school. ‘I reconstructed [the scene] the same way as the clip. In the beginning, they’re like, “wow, beautiful”. And then it gets bigger and in three seconds it goes from joyful to nervous laughter to screaming to panic. Like in the clip, it’s only the snow smoke that reaches the restaurant. The guests have to go back to their seats afterwards and they’re a little bit ashamed of their behaviour.’ In Force Majeure, Tomas wanders back and makes light of the incident. For Ebba, their holiday is ruined. What follows is a rivetingly humorous, sometimes painful look at how it affects their relationship, their kids and their social circle (Fanni Metelius and Game of Thrones’ Kristofer Hivju put in a great show as their friends, Fanni and Mats).
48 THE LIST 2 Apr–4 Jun 2015
For Östlund, it’s all about showing how human beings buck against expectations when they’re in perilous situations. ‘There’s an Iranian saying which a journalist told me,’ he says. ‘It’s: “when the water is reaching the mother’s nose, the baby is being put under the feet”. This is who we are and what we are able to do. We think we don’t have to deal with situations like that as we are living safe and secure lives. So we think “of course I will save my children i rst”, because we have no knowledge about what happens [in those situations].’ While Tomas spends most of the i lm trying to downplay his speedy exit, he snaps near the end; it’s the catalyst for Force Majeure’s most memorable scene, in which Tomas breaks down in heaving, pathetic sobs. It’s probably the most unsympathetic crying scene ever put on i lm, and it’s the one that Östlund is (probably) parodying in his Oscar video. When shooting it, he took his cues from – you guessed it – YouTube. ‘I always look for references on YouTube,’ he says. ‘So if I have a scene like this, I google “worst man cry” and see what is up on YouTube. I get a lot of inspiration on YouTube. I use it almost like a working method. Rather than looking at cinema history, I ask what moving images do we currently have of similar situations.’
Force Majeure is beautifully i lmed and Östlund wrings out every last drop of tension and humour from the scenario. Its lack of an Oscar nomination is certainly unjust, but that hasn’t kept people from watching – and loving – the i lm. VEEP’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus is even in negotiations to produce and star in an American remake. ‘A lot of people are asking me if they get divorced when they get home,’ Östlund says. Then he laughs: ‘I say if it’s a happy i lm, then yes they do get divorced. If it’s an unhappy i lm, they will stay together until death separates them!’
Force Majeure is on general release from Fri 10 Apr. See review, page 81.