Tropic Sprockets
Force Majeure
As a director, Ruben Östlund is not one to pull away from disturbing themes.
His previous film “Play” (2011) is about a group of black kids who rob a group of white kids for a lark. The film ignited a heated racial controversy among both critics and audiences. In the company of Lars von Trier and the Austrian born Michael Haneke, Östlund handles painful drama and invariably pushes our moral buttons without any concession or apology. And he doesn’t relent here.
In “Force Majeure,” we have a Swedish middle class family on a ski vacation. From the get go, the children are crabby and irritated and the parents are taciturn and self absorbed, paying more attention to their phones.
To break the routine, the family goes to a ski-side resort lunch. High peaks tower above them like huge snowy beards left from Santa’s sabbatical. The view is breathtaking. They chatter in holiday bliss. Suddenly, without warning there is an explosion. Fireworks perhaps. No, it is a controlled avalanche, says the father, Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), but the explosion roars closer and the snow tumbles onward.
Then with a sense of irrational horror and disbelief, everything goes white. The outside restaurant shrieks in terror. This one scene is heart-stoppingly terrible and beautiful at once. In impact and peril, this passage recalls something of Hitchcock’s “The Birds” or “North by Northwest,” given its initial start of black humor only to end in a sudden punch of incomprehension and anxiety.
After several minutes, the turmoil settles, visibility is restored. But the mother, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), realizes that Tomas took off and ran without a word during the chaos. Ebba keeps this to herself at first, but a hidden resentment builds. The couple grows gradually distant from one another as do the children: The grabby Harry (Vincent Wettergren) and the willful Vera (Clara Wettergren).
The film is masterful in illustrating a family under siege with each other. The resort dappled in an ethereal nocturnal navy blue light, seems drawn from a satanic Tin-Tin serial. The towering snowy mountains, while at first taken from the palate of the warm and sugary Kinkade, abruptly transform into a series of jagged points from a hostile planet, claustrophobic and strange.
This is a family displaced. Even the acquaintances are full of criticism, petty reactions and suspicion. Room 413 has a Kubrickian malevolence reminiscent of “The Shining.” Although the theme of a family breaking apart is nothing new by any stretch, Östlund gives wonderful details that sting like lashes from a whip, all the more potent in genius for their short impact.
Consider, the drone hitting a visitor in the stomach during a tense moral debate or a soporific bus driver who drives with an oddly lethal and careless intent through a steep mountain, not to mention a creepy housekeeper hovering with a vacant, fixed stare of complete disinterest.
Even those who appear the most mature and rational at first, including the measured and pragmatic Mats (Kristofer Hivju), become bestial and immature. Brace yourself. In watching “Force Majuere,” nature itself is neutral in mortal affairs and transgressive hearts rule the day.
Citizenfour
Most are familiar with the NSA scandal because of revelations such as the fact that Verizon and AT & T have submitted indiscriminate phone records of random innocent citizens under the guise of the Patriot Act since 9-11. But this overreach is especially damning to the Obama administration.
As a candidate in 2007, Obama said, in paraphrase, that a president has no moral justification for these actions. How I wish Obama had stuck to his conviction but, sadly, he did not. “Citizenfour” is a documentary by Laura Poitras about this very real abuse, and it also provides a gripping portrait of the man some love to discredit, and some champion: Edward Snowden, a former government NSA agent and now an exile.
As a story, it is as eerie as anything by “Gone Girl” director David Fincher. Director Poitras is contacted by truth seeker Glenn Greenwald as a result of her reportage, and their communication is encrypted. After seeing glimpses of Snowden as little more than a fractal phantom or a digital wraith, Poitras has a chance to meet the man in Hong Kong at a high-rise hotel.
After a series of laconic emails, Snowden is revealed and the abrupt sight of him in daylight is a bit like seeing an exotic leopard for the first time. He is open and direct, far from shy, yet with no apparent hunger for fame. He declares unapologetically that he had to tell the American people that they were, and still are, being watched and tracked with impunity.
While Obama once had a hands off policy and would not think of reaching into privacy matters, he now sees Snowden as an anti-patriot of sorts and criminalizes him in no uncertain terms. Former NSA agent Bill Benney corroborates Snowden’s position: That Verizon and by extension, the Obama administration, indeed harvested millions of private phone records, and shopping receipts from Amazon.com, without cause and without discrimination.
Such acts appear horridly blatant and painfully hard to justify. The most striking passages of this film occur when we see Edward as a kind of 21st century Shelley figure, typing away on his laptop, then moving quickly to the bathroom, a techo-Turkish wrap on his head. Snowden is frequently shown lazing upon a glacially white bed, his legs curled under him, his long ivory fingers his only prized possession, propelled in motion. There is existential humor, too, as Snowden is constantly harassed by phone, with Selena Gomez on TV, only to be interrupted by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer announcing Snowden as Public Enemy #1.
Pale and iced, a languid Edward moves to the bathroom with eye drops and hair gel, transforming himself into a neo-romantic figure of sorts. Donning a black coat, he strives to shade his face. He is part Isadore Ducasse combined with a dash of Guy Fawkes creating an all disturbing truth.
Our final sight of Snowden is in a Moscow apartment as he hovers over soup, almost daring the American public to consider him an ordinary citizen, were it not for the huge pot on the stove that bubbles away like some sort of sorcerer’s cauldron, not to mention the huge green winding houseplant that is carnivorous and alive–a pulsating anarchist aloe.
The most provocative moment of all in “Citizenfour” (in addition to Edward Snowden on a Megatron screen next to a Coach store) is the sight of a clinically dispassionate Obama flatly discrediting Snowden as criminally unpatriotic. Time will tell.
As Shelley wrote, “Power, like a desolating pestilence, pollutes whate’re it touches; and obedience, bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, makes slaves of men…” Where we once had Byron, Keats and Chatterton highlighting the evils of conformity and the tread of status quo, we now have the ice pale personages of Julian Assange and Ed Snowden rising from the binary ethosphere to point the errs of our age.
Write Ian at [email protected]
[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]
As always brilliant reviews in description and metaphor. Want to see both of these before they leave The Tropic. See you at the movies, Ian.