The Square

The Square (2017) is about a curator at a contemporary art museum in Stockholm. Christian is preparing a new exhibit: a square marked on the ground with a text stating that inside it everyone has equal rights and obligations. In the same period his phone is stolen, and what he does to get it back gets out of hand. The work in the title is real. Ruben Östlund and producer Kalle Boman made an actual installation at the Vandalorum Museum in 2014, with the statement that the square is a sanctuary of trust and caring in which we all share equal rights and obligations. The film grew from it. Its most discussed scene takes place at a fundraising dinner. Terry Notary plays a performance artist, and the artist plays an ape. Notary was known for primate movement from the Planet of the Apes films. Östlund said he built the scene around one question: what happens when an internationally recognised artist pretending to be a wild beast walks into a room full of people in tuxedos. Three hundred extras worked on it. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2017. Jury president Pedro Almodóvar praised it for depicting the dictatorship of being politically correct. It was the first Palme d'Or for a predominantly Swedish production since 1992. It cost 5.5 million dollars and grossed 9.5 million worldwide. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards. It runs 151 minutes. Good for: comedy of social embarrassment, satire of the art world, and Östlund. Less good for: at 151 minutes many sequences play like self contained shorts and the whole is loose. The embarrassment is intense and the ape scene is physically hard to watch. The target is sometimes far too easy.