The Square
“The Square” satirizes the kind of impotent, progressive relativism that has infected modern art and thought. In an early scene, a reporter — played by Elisabeth Moss — asks a museum curator about a particularly opaque description in the museum’s current catalog. He launches into an explanation emblematic of academic criticism that has caved in to its own emptiness.
The curator, Christian (Claes Bang), is an affable fellow and an ideal front man, tall and elegant, radiating confidence and rationality. In Bang’s performance there is a hint, but only a hint, that Christian might even have a clue that he’s a charlatan. In one of his first scenes, he describes a work of art by saying that the absence of something suggests the presence of it, a sophism that’s all the rage on college campuses. But as he says this, a look flickers across his eyes, suggesting he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“The Square,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, is a Swedish film, written and directed by Ruben Östlund. It’s long, always interesting and pointed in its observations, even if all the film’s elements aren’t quite integrated. Bang is at the center of the film (Moss appears in only a handful of scenes), and he’s a sympathetic figure, a perfectly nice guy contributing to the decline of Western Civilization.
“The Square” takes its title from a new exhibit the museum is promoting, an approximately 10-by-10-foot space on the ground, which proclaims itself as an oasis of kindness and peace. The simplicity of this has an apologetic sincerity, but it has no power. The movie seems to be saying that this range, between opacity and naivete, represents the available spectrum of art that we’re currently allowed to look at. It tells of an era in which art itself has become self-despising.
In one scene, we witness the pulling down of a highly middlebrow but communally pleasurable equestrian statue, placed previously outside Stockholm’s royal palace. It’s a moment that epitomizes art’s impotence and commodification.
“The Square” is a long film that doesn’t feel long. It’s funny throughout — not to say that it inspires many laughs, but it’s full of irony and absurdity and is very smart. Mainly, though, the film creates a sense of unease, scene by scene. Christian has his wallet and phone pickpocketed in the movie’s first minutes, and his attempt to get them back creates more trouble. But then, even relatively mild, two-person scenes here create a sense of impending danger, an abyss waiting to swallow up the central character.
In one of the museum’s exhibition rooms, there is a floor-to-ceiling digital panel showing a man in close-up, acting like an ape. The primitive human being that looks at us through the display expresses a wordless pathos, a victimized and yet mighty force in the human experience. This is the side of life that the sterile art in this museum would like to forget or contain. If “The Square” has a point — and it probably has several — it’s that the visceral aspect of life cannot be fully suppressed and shouldn’t be denied.