The Square Analysis

The Square

Written & Directed by: Ruben Östlund

Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival, 2017.

This film is tough to describe in one line, I wonder what the log line of this film was when the writer-director pitched this film. The protagonist, Christian played by Claes Bang, is the curator of an art museum in Sweden. There are different incidents which happen in the film to him and some incidents without concerning him much. He is robbed, his phone and wallet are stolen and with the help of his friend he manages to track the location of his phone to an apartment. He writes threatening letters and mails them at every house that he knows that they are the thief and asks them to return his phone and wallet to an address. There is a scene where there is an artist talking about art and one of the audience is suffering from Tourette's syndrome and he keeps yelling offensive words. It disturbs the event happening but they try to continue because he can't help it. When the host addresses him, and asks him if he had seen the art placed downstairs, he responds by saying 'garbage'. I looked at that scene as a metaphor for the disruption of art by money in today's world. It is annoying, but you can't do anything about it. 

The film maker creates many scenes where there is some off screen disturbance, which creates a quirky environment. In this scene, it is he yelling offensive words and in another scene where a couple is fighting there are loud sounds of some construction happening nearby. When the woman is about to yell, she is stopped by those sounds and she waits till the sounds stop. It's an interesting way to add some dynamics in the atmosphere and the drama, by just placing some off screen sounds.

There is a terrific scene, where a lot of people sit in tuxedos to witness the performance of a 'wild animal'. The very ambiguity of what the wild animal can do to the people sitting there, is what holds the tension in the scene for us and for the people sitting around. The wild animal first, scares a man away which itself scares the shit out of us and the people sitting there and then he drags a woman by her hair and tries to rape her.

There is another scene, where the woman he haves sex with offers to throw his condom away and at the beginning he says no with the notion that he will do that himself, because it is a personal task to be done by oneself and when she insists that he give it to her then he gets suspicious. Then the woman asks him, 'You think very highly of yourself, don't you?'. They don't explicitly address what he is thinking and why he is reluctant to give it to her and that's the most interesting part of the scene.

There are many such interesting scenes in the film, which work as a standalone exploring different themes like freedom of speech, privilege, being politically correct and many more but they don't feel coherent together in the movie. It felt more like an anthology of shorts, exploring different themes than a movie. I'm not expecting that it have a beginning, middle and end, but I couldn't figure out the core theme of the film and I didn't feel a sense of closure other than in the subplot of apologizing to the kid.