Will Oscar check the box for ‘The Square’?
Festival favorite has already been beating the odds
There’s never been a Palme d’Or winner quite like The Square.
The outrageous Swedish- and English-language comedy turned heads when it took the highest honor at France’s Cannes Film Festival in May, besting safer bets 120 Beats Per Minute, a French AIDS drama, and Loveless, a Russian relationship downer (which scored second- and third-place prizes, respectively).
The upset is a refreshing deviation from past Cannes victors. Not since Michael Moore’s barnstorming 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 — or Quentin Tarantino’s classic Pulp Fiction a decade before — has a film with a comedic bent won the festival’s top prize. The most recent recipients have been bleak foreign dramas I, Daniel Blake, Dheepan and Winter Sleep, all of which achingly explored class divides but didn’t land Oscar nominations for best foreign-language film.
That’s likely to change with Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund’s The Square (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles; expands to additional cities Nov. 3, including Boston, Phoenix and Washington; goes wider through November and December).
Set inside a contemporary-art museum in Stockholm, the sprawling satire follows a handsome, sententious curator named Christian (Claes Bang), who is preparing to unveil a thoughtprovoking installation called “The Square.” The art piece — a simple square drawn on the floor of the museum — is meant to double as a social experiment for visitors, acting as “a sanctuary of trust and caring ” for those who step inside.
“Within it,” the exhibit’s summary promises, “we all share equal rights and obligations.”
That Utopian ideal is in sharp
contradiction to Christian’s life outside the museum, where he falls victim to an elaborate pickpocketing scheme. Enraged, he tracks his stolen cellphone to a low-income apartment building and drops a threatening letter in every mailbox demanding his belongings’ return. Tenants are nonplussed.
Even when his phone and wallet are retrieved, Christian’s belief in the inherent goodness of man has been permanently tarnished. After a one-night stand with an American journalist ( The Handmaid’s Tale’s Elisabeth Moss), he refuses to let her throw away his condom out of fear that she’ll use it to get pregnant. The most irreverent tug of war you’ve ever seen onscreen ensues.
His misguided crusade for justice also distracts him from his duties at the museum, resulting in waves of negative coverage in the lead-up to the installation’s opening.
A depraved ad for “The Square” featuring a toddler and an explosive goes viral, although it pales in comparison to a disastrous black-tie dinner party for donors, where a Neanderthal-like performance artist takes his apeish act too far (in the film’s most squeamishly talked-about sequence).
Since Cannes, The Square has played at Toronto and New York film festivals, earning solid if not overly enthusiastic reviews (70% positive on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes). Sweden has officially submitted the movie for best foreign-language film, and awards prognosticators at both IndieWire and The Hollywood Reporter predict it will score a nomination.
Whether it has what it takes to make it to the finish line remains to be seen. Some voters may be put off by its taxing 21⁄ 2- hour run time, and Östlund’s caustic brand of humor certainly isn’t for everyone. (His last morality play, Force Majeure, didn’t make the cut for the 2015 Oscars.) But with the coveted Palme in hand and a much-needed dose of absurdity in tumultuous times, The Square may be able to go the distance.