The Square (2017)
Is the winner of the 2017 Palme d’Or and European Film Awards’ Best Film selection worthy of the acclaim? I think so. The Square is an outstanding unconventional display, concerning the world of modern art with a satirical self-reflexive approach that seriously touches the integrity of humankind.
The Square is the title of the newest art exhibit in a Stockholm art museum. Christian, the museum’s curator, describes The Square as “a sanctuary of trust and caring. [A place where] we all share equal rights and obligations”. Obviously this is the underlying matter of the film itself. The literal exhibit is never shown in its fullness because it is the thought that the film is centralized upon. Subsequently, the film is a semi-episodic one with several unconnecting, unpaid off scenes that arise from the exhibit’s theme.
It’s as if Christian, the overseer of all projects, the aesthetic-minded, is put to the test of his own exhibit. Do artists walk the line of integrity that they so mindfully impose upon their viewers or are they just as slumped as the norm, concurrently suffering from a priggish uprightness? Christian lives through two primary plot-lines; one revolves around his pick-pocketed belongings and the other is the development of the marketing campaign for The Square exhibit. The former explores intimate and personal morality and the latter regards public and social decency and obligation. Other supplemental bits scatter the script like Christian’s one-night stand with media journalist, Anne, and his parental role with his tussling daughters.
Rather than building scenes and sequences of drama to a final climactic point, writer/director Ostlund accentuates a palette of emotion for moments at a time. Christian’s ludicrous revenge on his muggers is a suspenseful thrill, where Christian’s excitation blinds him from his obvious misbehavior. Seeing his daughters fight, pout, and cry hurls the strenuous world of parenthood onto your lap, and it is so temporally close to the hilarity of Christian and Anne’s childish fling, as well as the outlandish marketing scheme by two young knucklehead professionals, that the film’s absence of build no longer matters. Our entertainment is held through accomplished fragmentary emotion-reversals. Hard sentiment returns and eclipses the laughter as Christian’s quarrel with a resilient young boy snowballs into a most uncomfortable situation that makes the boy look like the man of the altercation, tearing out all of our compassion for Christian.
Ostlund’s brilliance makes its’ mark from what I would consider the best standalone scene of the 2017 year, where Planet of the Apes star Terry Notary, plays Oleg – a man acting as an ape, among an upper-class group of men and women at a formal dinner. What is supposed to be a fun illustration of primal human nature takes a paralyzing dive into the bones of human survival, when Oleg takes his role literally and disrupts the dinner guests. Here are the artists, the educated, the sophisticated face-to-face with what they claim to understand. What do you do? Ostlund’s metaphor is a serious challenge to us all.
The Square is a prevailing work of introspection. Its ideas and its character are as smart as any film, and it only falls short of historical relevance due to limited technical talent. The art-house audience will eat this up, and the philistine might puke it out, but we should all at least try to develop our palates, right?
If you liked The Square, you might also like; The Disaster Artist (2017), The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Squid and the Whale (2005).
Check out the rest of my reviews on my website: Rauloncinema.com
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