A caustic look at the art world

Sweden's The Square takes us into a world where art and basic human values seem constantly to clash.

You could spend a couple of hours unwinding the many subjects addressed in Swedish director Ruben Ostlund's The Square. Ostlund, who shook up the art-house world in 2014 with Force Majeure, takes on the pretensions of the art world and the split between purported cultural values and simple expressions of humanity. He also tackles class divisions and the way a hopelessly elitist art world pushes itself toward weird extremes.

The Square of the title refers to an art space created outside of a museum of modern art in Stockholm. Inside the space, which actually is quite small, the atmosphere is supposed to be one of helpfulness and toleration, a tiny retreat devoted to trust and caring. Not surprisingly, the world outside the square turns out to be ridiculously corrupt.

Ostlund builds his story around the museum's curator. Claes Bang portrays Christian, a museum executive whose hypocrisy will be exposed as the movie unveils a series of episodes that sometimes amuse, sometimes confound and sometimes seem a little too on the nose to be as provocative as Ostlund may have intended.

If you're the sort of person who believes the art world is hopelessly out of touch with anything that concerns "normal" experience, you'll probably side with Ostlund as he poses a series of arty jokes. The main exhibit at the museum consists of piles of gravel assembled in the shape of small pyramids across a gallery floor. It's silly, of course, but just plausible enough to make us see why visitors to the museum might spend hours trying to tease possible meanings from these piles of rocks.

You may do the same with The Square. The movie is ambitious, scattered, funny, flawed and disjointed.

Say this, though, as the curator of the museum, Bang proves an able ringmaster as he presides over Ostlund's circus of a movie. American audiences also will recognize Elisabeth Moss, who turns up as a TV reporter doing a story on the new exhibit. Later, she climbs into bed with Bang's character.

Post sex discussion between the two characters hardly leans toward sweet talk, degenerating, instead, into an argument about who's going to throw away the condom the couple used. Perhaps a suspicious Christian thinks that Moss's character wants to set him up for a Lewinski-like dress moment. Who knows?

Did I mention that before the reporter and her subject have sex, a chimp wanders through Moss's character's apartment, creating both laughs and consternation? It’s one of the film's several WTF moments.

During the interview with Moss's character, Christian reveals that his major (and possibly only) concern centers on raising money for the museum.

That's not the only money-oriented moment in The Square. At a fund-raising dinner, a performance artist pretends to be a gorilla and winds up terrorizing the guests. This bizarre twist presumably is meant to show how much abuse viewers will tolerate if they believe they’re looking at art. The scene also exposes the ruthlessness that afflicts the art crowd. Under those tuxedos, monsters lurk. The whole scene would have made a spectacularly unnerving short.

Earlier, a couple of hip marketing geniuses persuade the museum’s staff that tolerance and compassion never will draw attention to The Square. To spice things up, they create a promotional video in which a girl is blown up. They wanted to give the project an edge.

Perhaps to knock Christian out of his protected cocoon, Ostlund includes a mugging in which Christian loses his wallet, his phone, and a pair of prized cufflinks. The resultant developments expose his silliness, as well as his inability to get beyond his own preoccupations.

So what to make of all this? Clearly, Ostlund has skills. He's a filmmaker who's interested in morality and responsibility, subjects that need plenty of attention at the moment. But in The Square, he's got so much on his plate that it takes him all of 2 1/2 sometimes taxing hours to unravel the movie's many threads.

As a result, The Square stands as a triumph of ambition that results in a wildly mixed achievement, water balloons dropped by a prankish director on the art world's many targets of opportunity.

Can this marriage be saved?

Set in the Alps, Force Majeure follows a marriage down a very slippery slope.

If a man abandoned his lunch, grabbed his cell phone and fled the avalanche that was roaring toward the deck of the ski-lodge restaurant where he happened to be dining, we'd probably applaud his good judgment and quick reflexes.

But in the case of Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke), that very incident raises questions about Tomas's manhood and his commitment to his marriage. Why? When Tomas bolts, he leaves his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and two children to fend for themselves.

As it turns out, the avalanche -- triggered by a controlled explosion of the kind ski resorts use to ward off major slides -- never reaches the restaurant? The episode is a scary false alarm.

Not surprisingly, Tomas has difficulty admitting what happened. But Ebba, who struggled to save her son and daughter, can't put the incident out of her mind.

Although Force Majeure takes place in a French Alpine ski resort, it's hardly a movie about the virtues of the great outdoors. Rather, it's a probing look at a marriage in which a single event exposes what surely must have been long smoldering issues in the lives of this picture-book couple.

As the movie progresses, Swedish writer/director Ruben Ostlund exploits these marital tensions: An ideal vacation -- designed to give Kuhnke's character a chance to spend more time with his kids -- quickly turns into an agonized nightmare.

No matter what Tomas says, it's clear that Ebba isn't going to give him the benefit of any doubt. She finds his behavior abhorrent on two counts: first, that he bolted, and second that he refuses to own up to it.

Things come to a head when Ebba brings the subject up in front of two other skiers, Tomas's divorced friend Mats (Kristofer Hivju) and the young woman (Fanni Metelius) with whom Mats is vacationing.

In an effort to help, Mats tries to chalk the incident up to natural survival instinct, something beyond Tomas's control. Obviously, Ebba isn't willing to buy into any such a rationalization.

It probably means something that Hivju's Mats has flowing red hair and a thick beard: He's a kind of Viking adventurer who's now plying a sea of younger women. When he and Tomas try to restore a bit of macho camaraderie, the movie takes on comic overtones.

Ostlund's marriage-conscious screenplay also introduces Ebba to a woman in an open marriage. This woman seems entirely relaxed about taking a break from her husband and pursuing sex with strangers.

Ebba may be upset by her husband's behavior, but she doesn't understand open marriage. Her views remain conventional.

The questions raised by Force Majeure are right on the surface. Are we wrong in assuming that men will act bravely in any situation in which their families are threatened? Has the marriage between Tomas and Ebba hinged on a fiction they no longer can be sustained? On an unconscious level, was Tomas trying to shed the weight of family and responsibility? Is there any way to dig out from the avalanche of issues that Ostlund so skillfully raises?

There's a big, emotional scene that I thought might go a bit too far, and a late-picture incident -- which can't be talked about here -- at first struck me as a bit of a copout. But it can be seen as something quite different if you reflect a bit on who these characters are, particularly Ebba.

Sorry to be vague, but how else to talk about a movie that's better discussed with others after they've seen it.

Meanwhile, it's worth reiterating that Ostlund has made a film that -- quite atypically -- explores issues of failed manhood, and then goes on to examine the role of illusion in sustaining a marriage.