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

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Sunday, August 16, 2026

Play (Ruben Östlund, 2011)

Anas Abdirahman and Sebastian Blyckert in Play

Cast: Anas Abdirahman, Sebastian Blyckert, Yannick Diakité, Sebastian Hegmar, Abdiaziz Hilowle, Nana Manu, John Ortiz, Kevin Vaz. Screenplay: Ruben Östlund, Erik Hemmendorff. Cinematography: Marius Dybwad Brandrud. Production design: Pia Aleborg. Film editing: Ruben Östlund, Jacob Secher Schulsinger. Music: Danny Bensi, Saunder Juriaans. 

So much of contemporary life is touched on in Ruben Östlund's Play that it's difficult to isolate a single dominant theme. It's about racism, of course, but it's also about bullying and vigilantism, about cultural appropriation, immigration, and alienation, about adolescence and parenting and the sterility of the urban environment and law enforcement and bureaucracy. The film stirred controversy in Sweden perhaps because no one could agree that it's about any one of these things and that it was making a specific point about them. It begins with a group of Black kids in a shopping mall, trying to con some white kids out of a cell phone by claiming it was stolen, and develops from there, interrupted occasionally by seemingly unrelated scenes set on a train, where a baby's cradle has been left in a passageway, to the consternation of the conductors. Everything is viewed with detachment, the camera in a fixed position, so it's almost like looking through a window at what's happening. Play takes two hours to tell a story without a resolution, but because of its skillfully maintained distancing it ironically involves the viewer more than a more dramatic or didactic account of the same incident might have.  

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