Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s fourth feature, Force Majeure, is a ruthless dissection of familial and social dysfunction. While on a ski holiday in the French Alps, an affluent Swedish family’s comfortable patio lunch is interrupted by the approach of a fearsome-looking avalanche. Initially accepting this as one of the periodical controlled snowslides the resort creates to keep the slopes clear, the diners’ interest soon turns to panic, as the pouring mound of snow and grit rumbles closer.
In the ensuing chaos, the father, Tomas, grabs his gloves and phone and dashes away, while the mother, Ebba, huddles their children together. No catastrophe eventuates, and when the powder subsides Tomas sheepishly re-joins his family. But something irreparable has been broken.
The remainder of the family’s holiday is played out as an excoriating marital tête-à-tête. Tomas cannot or will not account for the callousness of his actions, and Ebba is unable to let their significance pass by. The ensuing dispute drags in their friends and associates, as all their private and cherished assumptions—about bravery, about coupledom, about masculinity—are mercilessly exposed. Östlund films this breakdown with a coolly remote camera, in stark, geometric compositions that neatly draw out the comedy in this emotional crisis.
Östlund’s work seems designed to get a rise out of his audience. He constructs scenarios that hammer hard at the viewer’s sense of social propriety, stages them with an anthropologists’ sense of the foibles of human behaviour, and films them with the measured immediacy of a CCTV camera.
Below we discuss Östlund’s fluency in the culture of online video; his pleasure in finding new social pressure points to needle; and his thoughts on humanity’s tragi-comic obsession with self-image.
In his own way, Östlund is making movies for our current digital era, in which the neuroses of watching and being watched have taken centre stage in the human narrative. With a formal aesthetic that could be the hybrid child of Michael Haneke and an ALS/MND Ice Bucket Challenge, he takes the visual language of mass surveillance and transmutes it into scathingly funny social drama.
- James Robert Douglas
The Lifted Brow: There’s something about the avalanche in Force Majeure—inasmuch as it’s the inciting incident for the film—that is thematically perfect. It’s awe-inspiring, and terrifying, and convincingly threatening, but—like they mention in the film—it’s really only the detritus of the avalanche, the dust, that blows over the family. It’s like a phantom crisis, but the aftereffects are real. I’m really interested to learn how you conceptualised the avalanche when you were developing the film.
Ruben Östlund: The initial idea with the film was to have three different tourist situations where people are starting to act like they’re in a crisis even though they aren’t. One of the parts was on a bus ride; one was on a ferry line; and one on a ski resort. But when I looked at the avalanche that I wanted to be in the ski resort, there was a friend of mine who said “what if the father is running away from his kids, and then has to go back to his kids and his wife afterwards?”
Immediately when he said that I understood that this is what the film is supposed to be about: we are going to use this situation only, and build the whole film around it. I started to think about why this is situation so interesting – what is it about the expectations of the man and the expectations of the woman that are highlighted by showing this betrayal, when the father is supposed to stand up for his family, he is supposed to be the one who protects the family when there is an outside threat. That was the starting point for the whole film.
TLB: A lot of your reviews focus on your films being precisely calibrated, or having a kind of formal strictness, and you get comparisons to Michael Haneke, or Roy Andersson, who also have a meticulous, almost static style. I’m wondering what techniques you use to get that style in your films. Is this something you focus on in production?
RÖ: If you have seen my previous films you will definitely recognise that strict and formal style even more. In Play I had forty-two single take shots that were on a fixed camera position. In this film I had to cut a little more between camera positions. I had to get closer to the faces of the actors, and stuff like that. It was important for me when I was starting to make films to create formal limitations; because I think formal limitations create energy.
PULL QUOTE: I think formal limitations create energy.
For example, if I’m shooting a scene from just one angle, with one fixed camera position, then I immediately can say “okay, I can’t stand over here, I can’t stand over here, but here, somewhere here, we’re getting closer to something that is good.” So I can immediately locate myself on the set.
When we shoot, we shoot one camera position each day. Then we start working on what’s supposed to happen in front of the camera, and we work only on that. If you look at a normal shoot for a feature film, you have like twenty camera positions. It takes a lot of time to move the camera around and find the right angle and framing, and then you don’t have much time to focus on the acting. But for me, it’s trying to set up a way of shooting where I can focus one hundred per cent on what’s happening in front of the camera.
TLB: I understand that for some projects you have shot in wide framing on high resolution digital video and then selected camera movements and re-framed footage in post-production. Did you do this for Force Majeure?
RÖ: You should see a short I made—called Incident By a Bank—that is a re-construction of a robbery attempt, where I really used that technique. I was zooming a lot into the footage, and making the camera movements, and panning and so on. In Force Majeure I only did this in a couple of scenes, not very much.
It all has to do with what kind of camera you are shooting with. We were shooting with Arri Alexa, which has a 2k resolution – you can’t zoom too much into the picture and re-frame it because then the picture is destroyed. But if you have a Red camera, which can shoot in 5k, you have the possibility to zoom in much more, and re-frame and do camera movements without pushing the resolution too much.
TLB: In some interviews, likeone with the New York Times, you mention watching YouTube videos as part of your research, such as videos of an avalanche in the Alps, or clips of men crying. That got me thinking about the parallels between the static formal language your films use—with the stationary cameras, taking a distanced perspective on the events— and the kind of visual language that is common to YouTube, where you find a lot footage from traffic cameras, or CCTV. I’m thinking specifically of the Russian dashboard camera videos. There’s a similar look in one of your short films—Autobiographical Scene Number 6882—where a lot of the shots could be filmed from a traffic camera placed on the bridge. Do you think of your work as having a modern, almost internet-derived visual aesthetic?
PULL QUOTE: We are moving from being a text society to becoming an image society.
RÖ: Definitely, in one way I really think so. This kind of voyeuristic style, where you’re watching something rather than being in it, is something that I feel connected to. I started film school in 1998 and graduated in 2001, and there was a big revolution during those years. That was the time of Dogme, for example. Those were years where—I think they started YouTube in 2005—the developments in the use of moving images changed our society fundamentally. I think that if filmmakers, don’t adapt to that change, soon cinema will be like opera, where no one is taking notice, and it’s just something that we do because of tradition.
We are moving from being a text society to becoming an image society. If I look at the way my kids are using the internet, they communicate so much with images. Images are such a bigger part of the way we express ourselves nowadays. There’s a way of storytelling that was very dominant, and still is very dominant when it comes to the cinema, which is the way a plot is built. If you look at romantic comedies, you are thinking, “will they get each other in the end?” But if you’re watching a YouTube clip, it’s only, “what did it look like when he fell?” What did it look like? We are looking at moving images in a totally different way now. I am very inspired by that.
TLB: Have you used that sort of research process, of picking inspiration from YouTube videos, for your previous films as well?
RÖ: As soon as I have a situation that I want to shoot – for example, in Play there was a scene taking place on the escalators in a shopping mall, and I immediately go into YouTube and look up escalators, and I see what kind of references there are for escalators. The man cry scene inForce Majeure—where Tomas is crying—I was googling ‘worst man cry scene’, and then I get a lot of references, and I can look at these and create my own image of what I want to do. For the final sequence—with the bus driver—if you are looking on YouTube and you are googling ‘idiot Spanish busdriver almost kills students’ you will find the inspiration for that part. We have a catalogue of millions of moving images. For me, it’s very natural to go in and to see what kinds of moving images we have when it comes to scenes I want to shoot.
TLB: Some reviews of your films suggest that your work comments specifically on Swedish attitudes or social problems. Do you think of your work—I’m thinking specifically of the treatment of masculinity in Force Majeure—as having a kind of significance to Sweden in particular, or do you have something more international in mind?
RÖ: It’s hard for me to tell, but I have an international film in mind when I start to create it. I think specific differences between nationalities are what interests people in other countries, because we can reflect ourselves, and we can think about the ways of culture and behaviour present in the country that we live in. For example, in Sweden, everybody loves to talk about Norway, and what they are doing in Norway and Denmark, because we’re comparing ourselves with the differences.
When I make my films I have always tried to be as true as possible to how I would react. If I ended up in a certain circumstance, what would I do? Is this possible? Is it not possible? Why is it not possible? Can I change something so that it’s possible for me to do that? Of course, I have to put myself in a Scandinavian context, so it’s going to be affected by the culture that is in Sweden.
But I think that the role of the man—the role of the man as a hero, the expectations of the man to be a hero—is something that is very universal. If you look at the cinema history, I think that the man as hero is the most reproduced character. And as soon as he is not a hero, this is a big conflict for us.
PULL QUOTE: I was very inspired by the Captain of the Costa Concordia.
TLB: It seems to me that a lot of Force Majeure—and I’m also thinking of Autobiographical Scene Number 6882—is about the pressure of being under observation. You’ve got this visual style where the camera is at a distanced, observational perspective, and it always feels like there are lookers-on to the martial drama – like the cleaner at the hotel, who keeps witnessing the arguments between Tomas and Ebba. You seem interested in the psychological link between the way people behave and how they think of themselves being seen. I’m wondering if that’s something you’re consciously working through.
RÖ: I really love the feeling of how we are so afraid of losing face in front of each other, and the expectation on ourselves. I was very inspired by the Captain of the Costa Concordia and how he started this silly lie when he said that he fell into the lifeboat. I think it’s so interesting, this way of being watched from the outside: being under pressure of knowing about your self-image, and people judging your self-image. It’s a ghost that we humans have to carry with ourselves: the outside perspective on what we do and who we are.
And that’s different from almost all other animals. Other animals also have an outside perspective on themselves, but it seems like the outside perspective of the human is extremely strong. It creates the ability of humans to be very good in cooperating, to do things together. But when it comes to shame, and fear of losing face, we are doing really, really silly things many times.
TLB: Your films seem to have a really strong sense of group behaviour, and how that impacts on individual actions. Has that been a strong through-line for you, since the start of your career?
RÖ: Yes, definitely, ever since my first feature film. I really like that perspective, rather than the psychoanalytic perspective that Ingmar Bergman was interested in. With psychoanalytical perspectives on human behaviour—which I think have been over-represented when it comes to cinema—we are trying to explain things from letting a character be the good guy or be the bad guy. But when you look at it from a sociological perspective, or from a behaviouristic perspective, then we can get to know many things about how humans behave, and what mechanisms make us do things.
For example, during the avalanche, we can identify as both the one who runs and the one who stays with the kids. We create an understanding for both Tomas and Ebba, at least that’s what I’m aiming for, rather than doing “okay, he is the hero, and then he wins” – that is mostly the way that stories are told in the cinema.
TLB: When I saw Force Majeure at the Melbourne International Film Festival, there was an introductory video from you, in which you said that one of your goals in the film was to provoke couples into arguments. And the film really does seem precisely calibrated to do that. There’s just enough of the husband’s and the wife’s perspective for you to understand each side, but also maybe have a stake in one. I’m wondering how you balance this impulse to confront or provoke an audience with the requirements of telling a story.
PULL QUOTE: If you don’t have a provocation that is based on something that is an actual conflict in society, then it won’t work.
RÖ: I think it’s very hard to make a provocation that is working. If you don’t have a provocation that is based on something that is an actual conflict in society, then it won’t work. I mean, you can’t just show nudity or violence or stuff like that, because you can easily put that kind of provocation behind yourself, and not think about it.
For example, when I was working on Play I was interested in skin colour and racial issues. There was a set-up of five black boys robbing three white boys. There was something about the black boys, or the black skin colour, that provoked so much guilt, so much feeling of – we were reminded of an unfair situation, of an imbalance in society; that skin colour is connected with poor people and class.
I think that provocation worked really well because we want to think that skin colour isn’t an issue anymore: it’s just ‘racial issues’, or there are some racists in society that make it an issue. But there’s a structural level. I think you are even more into that conversation in Australia than we are in Sweden. Sweden thinks of itself as a really, really equal country where no one is treated badly. But I like when you find those provocations that hit on that level. The provocation comes from an angle that you don’t expect.
Force Majeure is now in cinemas.