The disturbing fallout of gut reactions in ‘Force Majeure’ and ‘The Loneliest Planet’
We’ve all heard of fight or flight reactions – situations that strip us down to our most human instinct to survive, revealing us to be either brave or a piece of shit. The most we can do is pray that we are never faced with circumstances that expose this side of ourselves, that we will never witness an avalanche with our families or sacrifice our partner on a weirdly sexual hiking trip. However, the unfortunate characters in Force Majeure and The Loneliest Planet find their relationships torn apart by split-second reactions that are seemingly outside of their control.
The Loneliest Planet was directed by Julia Loktev in 2011, starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg as a loved-up couple on holiday together. As they hike through the Caucasus mountains, an incident leads to one tiny gut reaction that changes the course of their relationship. It’s such a small moment that if you blinked, you’d miss it, but afterwards, everything is different; everything they thought they knew about each other and the foundation of their trust and intimacy is shattered.
Funnily enough, Ruben Ostlund’s 2014 film Force Majeure follows a similar strand of thinking, following a picturesque family on a skiing holiday that is abruptly ruined after an avalanche, with Tomas running away from his family instead of protecting them.
But what is more interesting than the events that twist a knife into the heart of these relationships is the emotional fallout that follows.
In The Loneliest Planet, both characters are too afraid to acknowledge what happened, walking in silence as this unspeakable reaction creates a gaping chasm between them. The aftermath of this event is explored almost entirely through silence and physical reactions, with the couple avoiding each other’s touch and gaze, letting everything go unsaid and eat away at their love. It sits in stark contrast to the opening of the film in which they could hardly keep away from each other, now cold and detached as they grow further apart.
However, Force Majeure explores this through intense emotional outbursts and discussions, with the couple choosing to talk about what happened despite going in circles about how they feel about it. We don’t see much between the couple in a physical sense, showing them to have emotional intimacy but not physical passion.
After a while, we’re left with this question – has irreparable damage been done to their relationship, or can they move past it? Can you restructure a relationship and build past a moment like this?
Interestingly enough, both films contrast the importance of physical intimacy in their central relationships. We only ever see an emotional intimacy between Tomas and Ebba, and the film ends with the two of them managing to overcome this hurdle in their relationship through the strength of this connection, eventually rekindling their physical relationship is well. But in the case of The Loneliest Planet, their inability to deal with this conflict is then shown through an act of infidelity, going on to stay together but without acknowledging what transpired on the hike.
Ultimately, both directors draw on the idea of how physical intimacy can be a deceiving form of closeness, and while these verbal and emotional bonds may seem less thrilling, the only relationship that survives is the one that has this. While the relationship in The Loneliest Planet initially seems more exciting, it ends as a hollow shell with no substance that lives up to their physical connection. Is Julia Loktev critiquing the importance that we place on physical intimacy? Perhaps she is, or maybe we are all hiding behind our own gut reactions…
