Making a monkey out of modern art

ON SUNDAY, the Cannes Film Festival’s prestigious Palme d’Or was bestowed on Ruben Ostlund’s Swedish film The Square.

It was not, in my view, the best picture in competition. Previous winners include Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now and Pulp Fiction. The Square, while sharply satirising the world of modern art, does not belong in that exalted company.

Indeed, it’s not as good as Ostlund’s last film, a small 2014 masterpiece called Force Majeure, which chronicled the fall-out when a man, caught in a skiresort avalanche, instinctively protected his mobile phone rather than his wife and children.

Nonetheless, The Square contains many pleasures, as well as the single most extraordinary scene I have seen all year, when, as a piece of performance art, a man pretending to be a chimp at first amuses, then unsettles and finally terrorises a roomful of diners at a fund- raising banquet. Like Force Majeure, the film also revolves around a man’s relationship with his phone.

It belongs to Christian (Claes Bang), the slick and handsome director of a Stockholm gallery, who considers himself irreproachably liberal, but when his mobile is stolen he traces it to a rundown apartment block in a workingclass part of the city and leaflets every flat demanding its return.

His assumption is that just about anyone in this block could be a thief — the film has plenty to say about class preconceptions — but eventually he learns his lesson at the hands of an enraged little boy. The Square has plenty of targets, not least prejudice, social media and the male psyche. (Ostlund lets his women off pretty lightly.)

The dialogue is mostly in Swedish, but Dominic West is very funny as a visiting American artist, as is Elizabeth Moss as a journalist who has a one-night stand with Christian.

There are good jokes throughout (an exhibit consisting of piles of gravel is accidentally swept up), but The Square is defiantly unstructured and way too long. Ironically, given the subject matter, it is a somewhat self-indulgent piece of film-making.

However, at the risk of sounding-pretentious myself, that remarkable banquet scene is as good an example of the connectivity between a film and its audience as I have ever seen, propelling me to the edge of my seat and practically off it.

If that’s what bagged Ostlund the big prize, then fair enough.