This is a part of an ongoing project in which I watch one movie from a different country every week. 

RUNNING TIME: 142 Minutes.

DIRECTOR: Ruben Östlund

WRITTEN BY: Ruben Östlund

STARING:
Claes Bang
Elisabeth Moss
Dominic West
Christopher Læssø

WHERE CAN YOU FIND IT: I got it on DVD from Netflix. It is also available to rent ($4.99) or buy ($14.99) on Amazon Video.

PLOT: A prestigious Stockholm museum’s chief art curator finds himself in both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit.

• The scene with Terry Notary (described above and portrayed in the film’s poster) was inspired by the Russian artist Oleg Kulik who was invited to the international group exhibition “Interpol” at Färgfabriken, Stockholm. At the opening, Kulik impersonated a dog. He growled, jumped up, rolled and bit one of the guests. He said he acted as a representative of the browbeaten Russian people, who now bite back.

• In the beginning of the film, a young woman confronts Christian (Claes Bang) screaming that a man is going to kill her and begging for his help. A man runs up to them, there is a brief altercation and both the man and woman depart. A moment later Christian realizes his wallet and cell phone are missing. This scene was based on a real life incident.  One of the director’s friends was robbed a similar way.

If someone asked me, “What is The Square about?” I would honestly have trouble giving them a two sentence plot summary. In fact the plot I provided above is copied from IMDB (with a few edits to help the flow).

In a way The Square is more of a series of scenes with the same characters following a loose plot thread involving a controversial (but also not controversial enough) art exhibit. There is less of a central plot so much as three or four mini-plots accompanied by several scenes that don’t feel entirely related.

These scenes and plot threads share similar themes involving art, class structure and how the wealthy treat the homeless. Nearly all of these scenes are very well acted, directed, filmed and scripted (at least the subtitles were well written). Several scenes would make fantastic short films on their own.

I have nothing against a film abandoning the basic story template. Not every movie needs the three-act structure or all the steps of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. That being said, when the end credits rolled, I was left feeling as though something was missing. The Square is better than countless other films that follow a clearly-defined plot, but at the end of the day the film felt more like a jumble of weird and unfortunate events that happened to occur on the same week.

But why is this a bad thing?

One could argue that I was thrown off because I was raised on movies like Star Wars,  Raiders of the Lost Ark and Die Hard, which all have extremely well-defined plot structures.  Even my favorite “intellectual films” The Bicycle Thieves, 8 1/2 and Dr. Strangelove have a very sharp focus on where the story is headed. Most of these movies have subplots, but these smaller stories all revolve around the central story and the direction our heroes are headed. For the majority of its run-time, The Square doesn’t have this.
 
So one could argue that my sense of something being missing has a cultural base. Perhaps if I had grown up in a society where Die Hard and Star Wars were a jumble of events rather than a focused story, I would have felt different.

But there might be a deeper reason as well. Humans use stories to view the world, even for purposes that don’t involve entertainment. If someone is rude to us at the grocery store, we come home and automatically share the experience in the form of a story.  Like the typical movie, we will have a hero, a villain, a plot and possibly even themes (“Why are people jerks?”) and subplots (“I never even found the right peanut butter.”)

We don’t turn life events into stories to create mega-blockbusters or fine art. We do it because we are following a natural pattern that helps us make sense of the world. That may be why I felt something was missing when I got to the end of The Square. The movie has plenty of small story-lines that lead to the character (possibly?) changing, but a central story line is missing.  None of the stories involved rise above the rest to become the single backbone of the movie. There isn’t a single goal that brings all the characters and events together.

Once again, I’m not even certain this is necessarily a bad thing, but it did leave me with a sense that the movie was all subplot. To me, The Square was less of a single story and more like a bunch of stuff that happened to the same people. While this makes for a very unusual movie, I suppose one could argue it does create a work that is more similar to real life.