Sweden  –  Comedy, Drama  –  Year: 2017  –  Running time: 151 mins
Language: English/Swedish/Danish

Audience Response:

Rating:  (3.4 from 16 responses)

• Excellent’: 6 votes
• ‘Very Good’: 6 votes
• ‘Good’: 0 votes
• ‘Satisfactory’: 0 votes
• ‘Poor’: 3 votes
• + 1 comments with no rating

Read the comments here or visit our “The Square” discussion page

Synopsis:

Disaster strikes when curator Christian hires a public relations team to build some hype for his renowned Swedish museum.  Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Ostlund follows up Force Majeure (2014) with this edgy satire on the contemporary art world, male privilege and middleclass do-goodism.  Lots of surreal, absurd humour as Christian’s image as a liberal paragon starts to crack.  Fine performances, notably from Elizabeth Moss and Dominic West.

… The Square is a strange mix of pop and profundity: archly entertaining, occasionally grating and consistently uncomfortable.
Mark Kermode (The Observer)

Director: Ruben Östlund 
Force Majeure (2014) / Play (2011) / Involuntary (2008)
Cast:
Claes Bang                                      …   Christrian
Elisabeth Moss                                …   Anne
Dominic West                                  …   Julian
Terry Notary                                     …   Oleg
Christopher Læssø                          …   Michael
(for full cast, and more information, see “The Square” in IMDB)

CFC Film Notes

Ruben Östlund’s Oscar-nominated assault on polite Swedish Society

One of the oldest pleasures of cinema is the opportunity it gives us to look at beautiful people in beautiful places, possibly having beautiful sex. Often audiences get exactly what they came for but sometimes it isn’t exactly straightforward. Take The Square, the Oscar-nominated film from Swedish director Ruben Östlund that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2017.  Its cast includes Danish heartthrob Claes Bang (tipped as a potential James Bond), handsome Dominic West (of Wire fame) and lovely Elizabeth Moss (freed from her Handmaid’s Tale wimple).  The setting is Stockholm’s
fashionable art world, so there’s a visual feast of ultra-cool art gallery interiors, gilded halls, luxury apartments, modernist offices and a Tesla slicing through streets familiar from all those Scandi noir series.

This isn’t a thriller, although it is certainly filled with jeopardy, and it isn’t a romance, although it has one of the most startling sex scenes I’ve seen since Toni Erdmann.  Instead The Square is a postmodern farce – a string of terrible mishaps befalls museum director Christian (Claes Bang) as he tries to hype a new exhibit and we watch his life spiral from cool to chaos.  It’s also a satire, gleefully poking fun at the pretensions of the art world and liberal Swedes’ earnest efforts to promote a dialogue on immigration and racism.

But most of all, The Square is brilliantly acted and very stylish, if at times just a little bit too pleased with how clever it is.  To describe the plot in any detail would be to spoil the film’s unfolding pleasures; suffice to say there is a theft, inept revenge, social and professional humiliation, and an actor impersonating an ape who should make Andy Serkis a tad jealous.

Östlund is following up his disquieting hit Force Majeure and his budget has increased exponentially.  For the first time he’s working with actors famous outside Scandinavia.  But his directing style hasn’t changed – grueling improvisations and multiple takes until the performance is just as he wants.  Director of photography Frederik Wenzel’s elegant shots are held at almost uncomfortable length; the audience is given plenty of time to observe closely each character as their thoughts and feelings flicker in front of our eyes.

There’s much clever framing too, marginal figures edging into our vision.  The spaces Christian navigates are both claustrophobic and hallucinatory.  Confusing, faintly disturbing peripheral sounds come from off-screen with no explanatory cutaways to their source.  Dialogue is kept naturalistic and doesn’t get in the way of the actors – Aaron Sorkin does not haunt this script.

The noodling a cappella score is a touch irritating in its over-signalling of wit and the child actors lack credibility, but The Square finds Östlund at the top of his game.  It should provide the most fun to be had in an art movie this month if not an art gallery.  And Claes Bang’s English accent, a homage to David Bowie, is startlingly good.  This Danish actor would have no problem squaring up to Bond.

Saskia Baron (reviewed in theartsdesk.com, Friday March 16, 2018)

Selected UK reviews:

New Statesman (Ryan Gilbey)
Sight and Sound (Violet Lucca) 
The Arts Desk (Saskia Baron)

 

 

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