Directed by Ruben Östlund
Starring Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, Terry Notary
Rated R
Playing at IFC Center, Lincoln Center
Even the most avid museum-goer would be compelled to admit that the line separating compelling art from unvarnished pretension can be a thin one.
“The Square,” an expansive surrealist drama from Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund (“Force Majeure”), is hardly the first movie to turn its satirical gaze upon this universe.
But the form reflects the content at hand with meticulous commitment. With its broad comic setpieces, interplay of heightened emotions and a droll sensibility, and general embrace of abstract weirdness, it plays exactly like a trip to an institution such as the Stockholm modern art museum at its center.
The picture, which won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, stars Claes Bang as Christian, the chief curator of the museum. He must navigate a series of increasingly strange circumstances while launching an installation called “The Square,” a space arbitrarily outlined on the ground in front of the institution that is meant to be a place of “trust and caring.”
In one sense, it’s a morality play that finds Christian’s deep-seated belief in the sanctity of this art and his most closely-held convictions of himself repeatedly tested.
Dryly funny, with extended scenes highlighting the absurdities inherent to the glossy abstraction that is the shared essence of the museum and the man at its center, the movie effectively eviscerates the recognizably high-minded aloofness that defines them.
If grand artistic statements made inside the safe space of a museum aren’t lived up to outside its doors, they don’t mean much.
