The Art of modern living (The Square, R. Östlund ) Swedish director Ruben Östlund after winning the jury's Un certainty for the Force Majeure (2014), returned this year to Cannes with his latest work The Square and this time he went back home with Palm d'Or. Östlund's The Square is a satirical guide through modern life, at the surface level, while in its metaphors lies the great director's philosophy of living.
Bite of reality
In the opening scene of the film, we meet Christian Nielsen (Claes Bang), curator of the fictional X Royal Museum of Modern Art in Stokholm, while giving a statement to journalist Anne (Elisabeth Moss) about the upcoming exibition "The Square". While Anne tries to penetrate Christian's "sublime artistic mind," asking…show more content… Östlund goes so deeply in his modern art satire that his biggest scene in the movie "Welcome to the Jungle" is shaped by the true performance „I Bite America and America Bites Me“ of the Ukrainian artist Oleg Kulik. Yet Ruben Östlund does not stop mocking others, but shares and parodies his personal experiences, from an incident at a square in Stokholm where his cell phone was stolen, over a man with Tourette's syndrome, who is on a cultural event, to the experiences during his art installation „The Square.“at the Vandolorum Museum in Värnamo in…show more content… Every appearance of the squares in the frame, as the characters themselves say, is a sign of safety. Yet behind the "safety" of the spatial square lies a lie, a play, the square is nothing but a means of expressing our ego, and as such has been attributed to the characters embodied by the higher social class.
On the other side, with every occurrence of circles, or round objects in the film, the protagonist speaks the truth, gets surrounded by chaos, and circles are the main feature of the lower social class, the ones living on the edge of existence, condemned to basic life needs.
Östlund does not leave things at two extremes so he shows us how transition looks from one form to another. The best example of this is the provocative promo video that Christian's colleagues put on YouTube. The video that promotes the forthcoming Square exhibition shows the child of "white ideals" (a four year old blonde girl) as part of a lower social class, where she stands in a square, that explodes.
