The Square – first look review

The Swedish direc­tor Ruben Östlund loves to satirise mid­dle class com­pla­cen­cy by pre­sent­ing moments of absurd humour with­in high-gloss tableaux. In his pre­vi­ous film, Force Majeure, he tar­get­ed the con­cept of mas­culin­i­ty. This time, the bulls­eye is drawn on those who pro­fess a sen­si­tiv­i­ty for art, but show inhu­man­i­ty to actu­al people.

Con­sid­er­ing that The Square just pre­miered at the world’s most esteemed art­house film fes­ti­val, the provo­ca­tion is auda­cious­ly close to home. Although, tak­ing this notion to its log­i­cal lim­it, one must ask: is there any val­ue to his film? Does Östlund think we would be bet­ter peo­ple if we spent 140 min­utes talk­ing to each oth­er instead of watch­ing The Square?

Not a sto­ry inas­much as a series of the­mat­i­cal­ly-con­nect­ed visu­al anec­dotes, The Square is held togeth­er by the pres­ence of muse­um cura­tor, the gan­g­ly and flop­py-haired Chris­t­ian. The actor play­ing him, Claes Bang, has an amaz­ing­ly vari­able face. In repose it is hand­some like a smooth bas­tard in a car com­mer­cial, but when crin­kled, it belongs to a har­ried father. Chris­t­ian fre­quent­ly appears baf­fled. His mouth has a ten­den­cy to hang open.

Due to his air of dis­tract­ed con­fu­sion, Chris­t­ian looks like some­one who had just been shak­en down for his phone, wal­let and grandfather’s cuf­flinks. This theft actu­al­ly hap­pens, and the wacky scheme to retrieve his goods sets in motion events that will even­tu­al­ly cause Christian’s civilised mask to fall away. Devel­op­ments in this arc are shuf­fled in a deck of mis­cel­la­neous scenes from life in a muse­um. Each set-piece unfolds with a dead­pan nat­u­ral­ism that builds to high­light the ridicu­lous­ness of every­one and every­thing enabled by this air­i­ly per­fect set­ting. Punch­lines are not pro­found. They tick­le rather than skew­er. The fact that gor­geous images and sce­nar­ios have been craft­ed in ser­vice of imp­ish gags is what cre­ates a sub­ver­sive pleasure.

Elis­a­beth Moss pops up to play an endear­ing­ly awk­ward, mon­key-own­ing Amer­i­can jour­nal­ist who has a fling with Chris­t­ian. Their scenes togeth­er are deli­cious­ly sil­ly, a fact ampli­fied by the humour­less tone both adopt. This film is worth watch­ing alone for Moss’ dev­as­tat­ing­ly con­cen­trat­ed sex face.

High-con­cept slap­stick is not the sum total of Östlund’s goals here. With­in the muse­um envi­ron­ment, there are no stakes beyond light com­e­dy, but in the broad­er world, peo­ple suf­fer, and Christian’s cow­ard­ly self-absorp­tion has con­se­quences. A turn­ing point involves an invis­i­ble the­atre per­for­mance that sees wild man Oleg run­ning into a room full of wealthy donors. When this exploit­ed cir­cus act goes awry, the knife the direc­tor has lodged in the back of his art-world char­ac­ters begins to drip blood.

Like Michael Haneke with a fun­ny bone instead of a mag­ni­fy­ing glass, Ruben Östlund’s vision of human­i­ty is a bleak, almost faith­less car­i­ca­ture of our most craven impuls­es. Nonethe­less, there is truth in his per­spec­tive: art does inspire high-mind­ed prin­ci­ples that mean noth­ing with­out real life appli­ca­tion. It’s quite a mes­sage to send the world’s crit­ics, and if his art does prove to be mean­ing­less, then at least it is self-aware.