The Guitar Mongoloid (Ruben Östlund, 2004)

Erik Rutström in The Guitar Mongoloid

Cast: Erik Rutström, Ola Sandstig, Britt-Marie Andersson, Julia Persdotter, P.A. Emanuelsson, Anna Johansson, Mikael Allu, Bjarne Gunnarsson, Pär Berg, David Olandersson. Screenplay: Ruben Östlund. Cinematography: Tibor Gent. Film editing: Ebbe Rutström. Music: Bjön Olsson. 

Ruben Östlund's first feature, The Guitar Mongoloid, is a plotless collage of life on the societal fringes of a Swedish city very much like Göthenberg. The key figure is a 12-year-old boy (Erik Ruström) who has aspirations to be a punk rock guitarist and plays his guitar on the streets. The scenes in which he features intersect with those of a variety of other characters, all played by non-actors, involved in things like smashing bicycles or dropping them off bridges, playing with a gun, getting into fights, and rigging a car to drive backward in circles. As a portrait of urban absurdity, it's sometimes amusing, sometimes disturbing, and often unsettlingly familiar. Made with the visual distancing that became key to Östlund's style, it's a useful introduction to his more involving work. 

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.  

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.