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Movie Review: 'The Square'

Cannes Winner is provocative, but what else?

By Sean PatrickPublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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The Square, the 2017 winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s highest honor, the Palme D’or, is a provocative and strange film. At times, the film defies description in its oddity and yet its points and purposes regarding political correctness as an excuse for the rich to ignore the poor are relatively obvious and on the nose. Directed by Ruben Ostlund, whose Force Majeure was far more interestingly provocative than The Square, the film has beautiful cinematography and a handful of the most interesting scenes in any movie in 2017.

Christian (Claes Bang) is the curator of a famed museum in Stockholm that specializes in avant garde performance art. The museum has recently received a very, very generous donation all the while the streets of Stockholm are teeming with the homeless and the helpless. Surely this type of money could be used for something better than a museum where the lead attraction appears to be an installation of piles of orderly gravel.

The new exhibit that this donation will help fund is another Avant Garde piece titled The Square. The Square is a lighted geometric square located in front of the museum. It is accompanied by a plaque indicating that "The Square" is a place of understanding and equality, to paraphrase the high end pretension. Christian now must find a way to market the installation and the museum board has turned to a pair of millennial artists who have an unique viral campaign in mind.

That would be enough of a plot and metaphor for some movies but it’s not enough for Ostlund, who prefers to tell his story by putting the handsome and successful Christian through the ringer. When we meet Christian, he is walking to work when a young woman comes screaming out of the distance. The woman claims a man is chasing her and threatening her life. However, when Christian and another man stop to defend the poor, frightened woman, Christian winds up getting pickpocketed and his seeming good deed proves to be the first of many indignities to befall our hero.

Christian, with the help of one of his employees, is able to track his phone to a nearby low rent housing complex. The two concoct a plan to post a bunch of notes in the apartment mailboxes, threatening notes demanding the return of Christian’s stolen property. The ploy works but has unintended consequences when one of the people on the receiving end of the note ends up getting in trouble and demanding an apology from Christian or else.

Even when things seem to go well for Christian, things turn strange, awkward, or unpleasant. Take, for instance, his bedding down with an American journalist played by Elizabeth Moss. She’s sexy and smart but also quite strange. After getting drunk together at a party, they go back to her place and find that she has a relatively large ape as a roommate. She does not comment on this. It’s just there. From there, the two proceed to make love before things get weird over how to dispose of a used condom.

Not long after, the journalist confronts Christian at his gallery and demands to know if he actually remembers her name just days after their tryst. She’s loud and argumentative and Christian’s employees can hear the ruckus. It’s a raw and strange performance from Moss that is completely in line with the film’s odd tone. Is it a good performance? That’s really up to your interpretation. I found Moss off-putting and her casting is more than a little unnecessarily showy.

The film’s other star cameo involves Dominic West who seems stranded in a Curb Your Enthusiasm-episode being filmed at the edges of The Square. I don’t mean that literally, although that would be wholly believable in this nutty flick. Rather, in the few scenes we see West, he is accosted by a man with Tourette’s Syndrome in the midst of an interview about his latest art installation at Christian’s gallery, he’s the piles of gravel guy.

Then, in the most audacious and fascinating scene in The Square, West’s artist attends a gala celebration highlighted by an avant garde performance piece by an artist who pretends to be a feral hybrid of man and humanity. The feral artist proceeds to run West’s artist out of the room with his aggro posing and taunting. The scene isn’t about West but about what art patrons will allow before their dedication to the freedom of the arts crosses paths with the societal obligation to protect others' well-being. Here’s a hint, the toleration of the audience is far, far too strong.

I’ve given you a strong approximation of what happens in The Square without really telling you much about it. That’s because there isn’t much about The Square. Obvious metaphors about political correctness run amok, the ways the rich justify their ignorance of the suffering around them, and the irony of The Square as a work of art are all on the film’s surface. It’s not that the film doesn’t have depth but rather that it is a highly pretentious form of depth, one adopted as a posture more than anything else.

The Square is in limited release as of October 28 and will expand throughout the Awards season.

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About the Creator

Sean Patrick

Hello, my name is Sean Patrick He/Him, and I am a film critic and podcast host for the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast I am a voting member of the Critics Choice Association, the group behind the annual Critics Choice Awards.

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