disturbing
Force Majeure is full of emotional crises
By Jenny Alvarez
Photos Agency
Written and directed by Östlund (Play, Involuntary), Force Majeure is dramatic, intriguing, challenging and disturbing. Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), and his willowy wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and their two blond, pre-teen children – travels to the picturesque French Alps to enjoy a few days of skiing. But during lunch at a mountainside restaurant, an avalanche turns everything upside down. With panicked diners fleeing in all directions, Ebba calls out for her husband as she tries to protect their children. Tomas, however, makes a decision that will shake the family’s world to its core. Although the anticipated disaster fails to occur, his marriage now hangs in the balance as he struggles to reclaim his role as family patriarch.
Despite of the snowballing tension and friction between the characters, this film is precisely observed psychodrama in which masculinity is satirized and full of hidden prejudices. Ebba is dealing with a near-death experience and feeling abandoned so here all the members of the family are affected mainly when the husband who reflects certain cowardice because he grabbed his phone and gloves and runs away from the oncoming torrent of avalanche, effectively abandoning his family in the process. Definitely is a film full of intense moments of pain and regret. Here is when the family must now deal with the fact that Tomas chose his own well-being over that of his family.
Captivating, hypnotic and deeply disturbing in “Under The Skin”
By Jenny Alvarez
Photos By Alfonso De Elias
From visionary director Jonathan Glazer comes a stunning career transformation, a masterpiece of existential science fiction that journeys to the heart of what it means to be human, extraterrestrial — or something in between. A voluptuous woman of unknown origin (Scarlett Johansson) combs the highways in search of isolated or forsaken men, luring this succession of lost souls into an otherworldly lair. They are seduced, stripped of their humanity, and never heard from again. Based on the novel by Michel Faber (The Crimson Petal and the White), Under The Skin is a bizarre movie with a character who examines the human beings with her borrowed skin, until she is abducted into humanity with devastating results. Definitely is very provocative, intense, and intriguing hypnotically without any special effects. Scarlett Johansson performs a pattern full of female sexuality or empowerment which lures to a completely dark location, tempts her victims to strip naked with the promise of sex, and then the man sinks into a dark abyss. At the end of the story as a reviewer, this is a character full of obstacles and painful journey because this woman set her eyes on our chaotic planet or culture, crowd noise and as humanity is shown as creatures in a wild habitat. Eventually her tragic end doesn’t have a clear goal or a mission in a borrowed skin with a gorgeous but false surface. Definitely is a great movie with transformation and transfiguration.
