A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, February 22, 2020

The Square (Ruben Östlund, 2017)


Cast: Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, Terry Notary, Christopher Læssø, Lise Stephenson Engström, Lilianne Mardon, Marina Shiptjenko, Annica Liljeblad, Elijandro Edouard, Daniel Hallberg, Martin Sööder. Screenplay: Ruben Östlund. Cinematography: Fredrik Wenzel. Production design: Josefin Åsberg. Film editing: Jacob Secher Schulsinger. 

Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or winner The Square is a satire, but its objects are so many -- the art world, public relations, economic inequality, social inequity, smug political correctness, and so on -- that it tend to lose focus at moments when it should be sharpest. Added to that, Östlund indulges his absurdist side so often -- a chimpanzee wanders unexplained through an apartment, an interview is persistently interrupted by the shouts of a man with Tourette's -- that it's often hard to decide what's important in the film. The writer-director has been compared to Luis Buñuel, Michael Haneke, and Lars von Trier, but he lacks Buñuel's control, Haneke's cynicism, and von Trier's cruelty, so that any edge the satire might have is blunted. It's also two and a half hours long -- perhaps half an hour longer than it should have been. Still, it's a film of very funny moments, and a few disturbing ones, and the performances, especially Claes Bang as the museum director hoisted with many of his own petards and Elisabeth Moss as the American journalist who interviews and sleeps with him, are skillfully entertaining.  

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