A performance artist terrorizes a roomful of snooty socialites.
Dense with ideas, writer-director Ruben Östlund’s The Square ruminates assuredly on art, commerce, marketing, wealth, power, poverty, parenthood, political correctness, and what to do when some guy won’t stop yelling obscenities at a museum talk. This satirical Swedish drama, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, will screen on Nov. 8 at 7 p.m. as part of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s Spotlight Cinema series. I hope that doesn’t turn out to be your only local opportunity to see this extraordinary film on the big screen, Madison, but regardless, don’t miss it. Get in line now.
The Square centers on Christian (Claes Bang), curator of an art museum. The job requires schmoozing with wealthy donors, speaking the highfalutin’ language of the contemporary art scene and acquiring provocative artworks so they can be experienced and enjoyed by the public. Christian, played remarkably well by Bang, is adept at these tasks. He is less adept in certain other endeavors, such as being a responsible, loving dad to his two young daughters.
Christian sets in motion the two main plot threads, one personal, the other professional. In one, he loses his wallet and phone in a big-city street scam. Egged on by an underling who is wise in the ways of GPS, Christian traces his phone’s location to a grim high-rise apartment building, then rashly distributes threatening letters to every resident. He gets his stuff back, but that’s not the end of the episode. I won’t say more, except to note that Christian really is not good with kids.
In the other major story, Christian and the museum acquire a piece of outdoor art that proves at least as controversial as that obelisk thingy outside Camp Randall. The square that gives the film its name, the artwork is a simple, luminous geometric shape set in the paving bricks outside the museum. In one of several droll scenes that evoke the changing nature of art, a traditional equestrian statue is clumsily demolished to make way for the new piece. Christian brainstorms a marketing strategy with a PR team whose young members are unimpressed with Christian’s dry descriptions of the work. “To get journalists, you need controversy,” they say. What the publicists come up with is surely controversial, hoo boy. Distracted by his personal problems, Christian absentmindedly signs off on the marketing plan. Disaster follows.
All of this plays out in bustling Stockholm, where Christian’s fancy Tesla car attracts attention from passersby, and where busy professionals brush off requests for money from beggars, who are ubiquitous. Meanwhile, Christian has a dalliance with a journalist played by a staggeringly good Elisabeth Moss, late of The Handmaid’s Tale and Mad Men. Also meanwhile, Östlund spoofs the art world with a series of jokes and scenes. The most dramatic example of this is an astonishing set piece in which a performance artist terrorizes a roomful of snooty socialites. The scene starts out as comedy, then turns into horror. It’s powerful stuff.
