Movie "Force Majeure" explores expectations around male heroism

Article here. Excerpt:

'The Swedish director Ruben Ostlund said he had two goals for his new film, “Force Majeure”: “One is to create the most spectacular avalanche in film history. The other is to increase the rate of divorce.”
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Selected as Sweden’s official entry for the foreign language Oscar and set in a ski resort in the French Alps, “Force Majeure” explores the fallout when a panicked father abandons his family as an avalanche approaches. His initial denial about this display of cowardice morphs into humiliation and emotional collapse, to the dismay of his two children and distaste of his wife, all of which Mr. Ostlund tracks with a darkly comic eye.

“The male superhero is the most reproduced character on film,” Mr. Ostlund, 40, said by Skype recently from his home in Goteborg, Sweden. When asked if he happened to be divorced himself, he replied, “Yes, of course.”

“I wanted to make the most pathetic male character on film,” he added."
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"One of the most painful things for us humans is to lose face in front of each other,” he said. “We almost would rather die.”
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"The thing was, they really had a hard time getting over it,” Mr. Ostlund said. “We are living in an honor culture. We say we don’t have expectations of a man’s role, but it’s obvious what was expected of him.”
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Johannes Bah Kuhnke, who plays the father, Tomas, in “Force Majeure,” said the role was especially discomfiting because of the near negligible social tolerance for male weakness.'