Why ‘The Square’ Is The #1 Film Of Last Year

THE SQUARE

In crowning The Square the #1 film of last year, yr old pal Film Carew called it “not just the film of 2017, but the most 2017 of films”. This is not an indictment of its on-trendiness, but a superlative celebration of its timeliness. Ruben Östlund’s fifth feature dives into trenchant contemporary themes, his supposed ‘art world satire’ instead — like his previous works — exploring how humans behave in communal spaces.

Its title references a conceptual artwork within: a lit-up area outside a Stockholm museum signifying a social experiment, “a sanctuary of trust and caring” wherein anyone can seek or offer help. It’s, in short, a small, caring public space at odds with the vast, uncaring public space surrounding it. It’s a work, says feckless museum-director Claes Bang, about “how we relate to each other in a social context”; its simple lines like a pedestrian crossing, denoting an implicit contract by those who walk over them. When he talks about The Square within the film, Bang is essentially discussing the themes of the film itself. As with the cruel, Hanekean Play, Östlund ruthlessly examines shared social responsibilities, the bystander effect, the flight towards self-preservation, the turn towards mob mentality, the erosion of our trust in others.

Bang’s museum-figurehead is smarmy, slickly-haired, glib; a master of press-conferences, of charming the donors/patrons/corporate sponsors, and of talking in pseudo-intellectual circles. Early in the first act, we see him being interviewed by Elisabeth Moss’s American art-critic, and his answers are all essentially empty, full of circle-turning verbal pirouettes that, duly, go nowhere. This clues us in, immediately, to the fate of his character. His curator is a figure of traditional masculine importance, privilege, and cultural currency. So, especially for anyone who saw Östlund’s previous picture, Force Majeure, we know that all his male vanity cometh before a fall, The Square turning his masculinity into a running comic riff; doubled by the fact that, in his mind, Bang’s character is a ‘nice guy’ out to do ‘the right thing’.

The most openly-comic moment of this running comic riff coming when Bang and Moss, after having awkward sex (replete with amazing POV shots), fight over a full condom; he, of course, the kind of egomaniacal male who believes his semen worth its weight in gold, and that women’re scheming to get it. Bang’s bro already has kids, two girls, but he’s a divorcée, a distant father only occasionally there for his daughters’ competitive cheerleader tournaments. Instead, he’s navigating various social minefields: battling not just with Moss over a condom, but with Elijandro Edouard, a pre-adolescent housing-estate scamp who, in an unlikely turn of events (satirising cinema’s obsessions with ‘justice’, replete with Justice on the soundtrack), ends up in a war-of-wills with this middle-aged man. Edouard’s great declaration is, simply, “I will make chaos for you”.

Chaos, in turn, makes the episodic narrative come alive. In one of many meta-moments herein, Bang is asked “do you personally believe you crossed a line?” Östlund is, as director, a habitual line-stepper. His vignettes — comic, cringe-inducing, confrontational — are out to poke at and provoke viewers, examining the way individualisation, alienation, charity fatigue, political correctness, and white privilege all inform how people act; or, often, fail to. Recurring devices show homeless people and charity collectors asking for change from the rushing stream of pedestrians passing them by, met by blanket rejection. “Do you want to save a life?” the latter asks; passersby ignoring, deflecting, or denying the question. “Not today,” Bang says, amazingly. Soon thereafter, when he attempts to play the hero, he becomes the victim. When his phone and wallet stolen in a scam, his loses are like a lesson taught by current-affairs-show fearmongering: strangers don’t need your help, they’re out to get you.

In one of the many memorable scenes showing how social rules and conventions can repress behaviour, a press-conference is interrupted by profane outbursts, attendees unsure how to react: they want to get pissed off, but if the yeller has Tourette’s, their anger would be a social faux pas, reflecting badly on them. So, as always, the best response is to stay silent, head bowed. Walking that glinting knife-edge of modern manners is entrenched in daily life, especially online. In turn, The Square duly devotes a dramatic arc to that most 2017 of dramas: internet outrage. Östlund cutely illustrates the way swarming hives demanding angry-mob justice can be, for high-capitalist content generators, both marketing disaster and publicity boon. A video that’s gone viral for all the wrong reasons is met with a phonecall from YouTube about Google-ad placement and profit-revenue sharing; the appetite for schadenfreude and public-shaming a recipe for mucho monetisable clicks.

As Östlund ups the oft-comic discomfort, it becomes clear that, for all its modern-art satire (an exhibition herein is literally called Mirrors & Piles Of Gravel), The Square is more interested in mocking those who visit galleries; the humans who scratch their chins at conceptual works, seeking to be provoked within the safe confines of high-art. These are the same people who watch art-movies, of course; the kind of people who will be watching The Square.

The instantly-infamous scene in which Terry Notary plays a performance-artist methoding out as violent ape amidst a set of silver-haired, evening-wear’d black-tie-gala luminaries feels as if it’s lampooning the moneyed milieu that delight in Östlund’s cinematic monkeyshines at Cannes; the danger in the scene echoing the danger of the director’s grand satirical gambit. Like the film itself, this scene is audacious, seditious, thrilling; the cinematic equivalent of biting the hand that feeds you with a smile on your face.

RED SPARROW

For all its sex and seduction and double-crosses and triple-crosses and scenes of gruesome torture and Jennifer Lawrence’s immaculately-trimmed fringe, the most exciting moment of Red Sparrow, at least for me, came when the action switched from Moscow to Budapest, and the establishing shots of Budapest weren’t matched to the name of the city teletyped on screen, replete with a typing sound-effect. This may sound like the most trivial of details, but if you’re the kind of human who’s seen a million spy-movies, the persistence of the city-name-teletyped-on-screen-replete-with-a-typing-sound-effect bit is one of the strangest tropes to go on unquestioned, something so indivisible from the genre some viewers may barely even notice its existence.

The fact that Red Sparrow does away with that one tiny trope suggests a greater mission, to make a spy-movie that doesn’t lean on thriller clichés. The book upon which the film is based was penned by Jason Matthews, a former CIA operative. Which means that, for all its Russians-characters-played-by-non-Russian-actors-speaking-English-with-Russian-accents and florid narrative fantasies —Lawrence plays a Bolshoi ballerina blackmailed into spying for Mother Russia— the spying side of things, at least, is grounded in reality.

Which starts from the fact that, in the Cold War, Russia really did train female operatives, ‘sparrows’, whose job was to use tools of seduction to delude and betray enemies of the state. Here, that means Lawrence is sent off to a boarding-school of brutal sexual manipulation (“you sent me to whore school!” J-law spits, at shady KGB uncle Mathias Schoenaerts), located somewhere in Siberia but hosted by Charlotte Rampling’s prim school-marm. It feels a little like the Black Widow movie Marvel’s never bothered to make, only with super-hero-ism swapped out for sexual manipulation, cruelty, abuse. Lawrence’s character has to learn to shelve her pride: — AKA: take her kit off on command, which has a meta-quality in terms of Hollywood’s long-time treatment of women — and fuck whoever the State tells her to.

Upon graduation, her first field-work involves going to Hungary to Joel Edgerton’s American spy, only soon he’s tailing her, and they’re flirting with each other, and not even bothering to keep up their mutually-tailing spy-game ruse, only maybe telling each other openly what they’re doing is its own spy-game ruse. In the middle of this, there’s none of the flashy action-movie set-pieces that the genre deals in: no automatic weaponfire, no shootouts, no car-chases, no ultra-wealthy villains with elaborate schemes. But there is a great ‘drop off’ deal, in which a drunken, scene-stealing Mary-Louise Parker sells secrets — on old-school floppy-disks for some reason! — to the Russians, only she’s really selling them back to the Americans (it’s v. complicated).

Whilst none of its various back-and-forth dramas are particularly inspired, Red Sparrow is unafraid of depicting flesh in both its honeypot-training-academy and its scenes of torture. Director Francis Lawrence, who made the final three Hunger Games movies with his leading-lady/namesake, seems duly emboldened, as if glad to be freed from the realm of fantasy-dystopias. In its early stretches, his direction is often inspired: the film beginning with a bravura sequence — cross-cutting between J-Law performing as ballerina at the Bolshoi, and Edgerton making a botched drop with a secret source — that creates a sense of energy that flows through the film; keeping it from flagging even as it rolls on for 140 minutes.

MUTE

First, Duncan Jones made Moon, which everybody loved. Then, he made Source Code, which some people loved. Then, he made Warcraft: The Beginning, which nobody loved. Mute, upon its announcement, seemed like a hopeful bet to arrest the director’s downward spiral: after years lost helming a big, bloated, brand-managed fantasy franchise, his fourth film found Jones returning to sci-fi, the genre in which he’d made his name. The film was funded by Netflix, with creative freedom part of the bargain. And it was the first film Jones made following the death of his father, David Bowie; to whom its vision of a dystopian-future Berlin is dedicated.

One problem: Mute isn’t very good. It’s a classic case of a director imagining an elaborate sci-fi realm, lovingly rendering the details of its technologies and society, yet using that world as but a backdrop to tell an utterly generic story. In its Blade Runnerist Berlin, a hero — stoic, noble, driven — journeys into a criminal underworld to track down his missing girlfriend. This underworld is full of pimps, hookers, brothels, bars, mafia thugs, hired goons; and, eventually, said silent hero must beat them all, often to death, to try and rescue his girl.

The hero is literally silent: Alexander Skarsgård playing a mute bartender, a cutesy riff on the taciturn, Eastwoodian hero. Seyneb Saleh plays his blue-haired goon, a love-interest who works as a waitress at the same bar. When not speaking aloud utter blandishments and banalities, she says evocative things like “you don’t know me”, alluding to some sort of dark, secret past. When she disappears, a tale of, essentially, bloody revenge is set into motion; Skarsgård destined to clash with a pair of American surgeons —Paul Rudd in walrusian handlebar moustache and standard-issue sociopathy, Justin Theroux in downy blonde wig and cutesy-slang and lusting-after-young-girls-therefore-he-deserves-to-die— who offer their services on the black market.

Like Blade Runner — to which Mute is openly, fan-ishly in debt — the attempt is to make a neo-noir set against a neon-lit future metropolis; a dark near-future realm filled with dens of vice and flying cars. With its mute protagonist, Mute probably hopes — like Guillermo del Toro’s fish-fucking melodrama Shape Of Water — to be thought of as some hyper-stylised contemporary riff on fairytale. To wit: Saleh says, early in the first act, “it’s like it’s from a fairy tale!”

This is, essentially, how Mute goes. The dialogue is direly illustrative and often wooden, Saleh’s character remains forever a two-dimensional ‘attractive woman’ figure on which men project their desires, and things are always spelt-out and obvious, especially Clint Mansell’s awful score, which verily tells you every emotion you’re supposed to be feeling in forceful, artless fashion. Sure, it’s not Warcraft bad, but for Jones admirers that’s the coldest of consolation.