Phone a friend — and watch this

THE Square won Swedish director Ruben Ostlund the prestigious Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.

In fact, it’s not as good as his previous picture, a small 2014 masterpiece called Force Majeure, which chronicled the fall-out when a man, caught in a ski-resort avalanche, instinctively protected his phone rather than his wife and children.

However, it does contain many pleasures, as well as one of the most extraordinary scenes I have ever seen in the cinema, 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 fundraising banquet.

Like Force Majeure, the story revolves around a man’s relationship with his phone. It belongs to Christian (Claes Bang), the slick, handsome director of a Stockholm gallery, who considers himself irreproachably liberal. But when his mobile is stolen he traces it to a run-down apartment block in a working-class area 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 boy. The dialogue is mostly in Swedish, although Dominic West is very funny as a visiting American artist, as is Elisabeth Moss as a journalist who has a one-night stand with Christian.

Unfortunately, The Square is defiantly unstructured and way too long. Ironically, given the way it also skewers artistic pretentiousness, it is a somewhat selfindulgent piece of film-making. But it’s worth seeing for that one scene alone.