Europa, Europa

A pair of clever films with twists that are better experienced fresh, so I'll tread carefully:

FORCE MAJEURE (B+) - This is a good film on the brink of being great, but it never gets there. The Swedish sleeper tackles one of my favorite subjects -- the quiet, sometimes comic, dissolution of a marriage.

The premise is delectable, but the two-hour running time weighs on its three-act structure. A model family -- Wahlberg-handsome husband, model of a wife, cute boy and girl -- are ensconced at a resort in the French Alps for a ski holiday. They sleep together in a king bed in matching jammies, they brush their teeth in front of the bathroom mirror together, they hit the slopes together.

[MILD SPOILER in this paragraph, but nothing that's not in the trailer.] One afternoon, at lunch on an outdoor terrace, we hear a bang that sparks a regular controlled avalanche, and we see the waves of snow peel down a nearby slope. (The cinematography is quite lovely throughout the film.) It quickly becomes clear -- as small talk among the diners grows nervous -- that this avalanche is getting too close for comfort. Panic ensues, and the father, Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), reacts in a less-than-valiant manner. Everyone survives, but Tomas' wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), is chilled by the experience.

Writer/director Ruben Oestlund handles this tectonic shift in the marriage masterfully. The way the lunch scene is shot, it's apparent what has occurred but it's not patently obvious. When the dust clears (literally), the gravity (and dark humor) of what has occurred slowly sinks in for the viewer. It isn't until Tomas and Ebba are dining with friends that she blurts out the festering little secret. The tension in their marriage is split open like a wound, and true drama builds as the couple, and their perceptive children, struggle to come to terms with what may have been a shell of a relationship all along, just a white-picket-fence fantasy.

But it's the cutting humor that does the heavy lifting here. We are treated to a wonderful dinner-party scene with another couple, Fanni (Fanni Metelius) and Mats (Kristofer Hivju), who give off the wacky vibes of Carol Kane and Zach Galifianakis. Hivju is a rubber-faced comic, and his expressions are priceless, as Fanni's confidence in her man is shaken, as if Tomas and Ebba's crisis of faith is a communicable disease. (A lurking, heavy-faced maintenance man also provides a few Buster Keaton moments as a silent one-man Greek chorus.)

Meantime, Oestlund drops in the ominous first few bars of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" (Summer) at key moments, using it as a cue that he's ratcheting up the stakes and portending more troubles in paradise. He maniacally takes a seemingly innocuous event and shows how it can exploit the smallest of fissures in a relationship.  Oestlund would have been well-served to have tried to whittle this down closer to a lean 90 minutes. With a nip and tuck here and there he might have wrought a devastating masterpiece. 

BIRD PEOPLE (B) -  Do you ever stop to notice the birds? This film does, though its message can be as inscrutable as that conveyed in a robin's tweet. A quirky study of the human condition, "Bird People" is well served by strong lead performances but it is undercut by a droning middle act that nearly sinks the film.

Successful businessman Gary Newman (our guy Josh Charles from TV's "Sports Night" and "The Good Wife") is holed-up in an airport hotel at Paris' Charles de Gaulle. On the eve of a big meeting, he is having a major midlife meltdown. As the hour of his early-morning flight approaches, he has puddled into a full-on panic attack. When the sun comes up, he has made a major decision that affects his career and his family.

Meantime, we see perky Audrey Cazumet (Anais Demoustier, "Elles"), a college dropout slumming as a maid at the hotel. In subtle movieland fashion, Gary and Audrey's paths will cross. What we don't know is what significance (if any) there is to their pairing at this place and time.

Gary eventually has a video-chat showdown with his wife back in America. Their conversation is alternatively raw and tone-deaf. It drags on for an unbearable length of time (if you notice the background of the scenes their discussion apparently lasts hours; in the film it only seems like it lasts that long).

There's not much more that can be said without spoiling the entire second half of the film, when the focus switches to Audrey. Demoustier has an appeal similar to that of Shailene Woodley, and Audrey bounds around the hotel, privy to intimate glimpses of the residents hotel rooms, just like a sneaky little mouse or, of course, a curious little sparrow perched on the window sill.

Suddenly, magical realism swoops in. The point of view shifts dramatically and we get a literal bird's-eye view of the outskirts of Paris, not only from the sky, but skittering along paths and flitting through buildings. The director, Pascale Ferran (writing the script with Guillaume Breaud), handles this jolt to the senses beautifully. Her camera captures every little movement of our little feathered friend with the same intimacy with which she studies those humans in the hotel. (It appears to be an actual trained bird, not a special effect.) Ferran transforms this live action into an experience akin to the most fanciful of animated stories. It's an incredible feat.

"Bird People" can be quiet and profound, as well as numbingly frustrating. (We really don't need to watch various characters pensively light a cigarette a dozen or more times throughout the proceedings.) Go for a popcorn run during the interminable marital Skype session but then settle back in for a cinematic delight.