Trumpet Tongued

note to reader: contains mild plot point spoilers, would recommend watching the film before reading! this is less of a review, more a response.

life is absurd, and the square wants you to know it. or more specifically: society is absurd. social order is fragile, paper thin. we’re indoctrinated into the way things run. the smallest thing can shatter the illusion of civility we live in.

there is nothing scarier than sitting down to watch a film dealing with a subject you live and breathe. i remember watching Whiplash (2014) in a packed Covent Garden Odeon on a saturday night sitting next to my brother, a jazz drummer. everybody in the cinema really vocally loved it. there was thunderous applause as soon as the credits rolled. i remember him physically retching on the street in disgust at the way chazelle had portrayed jazz and music school. ‘music isn’t about competition or violence.’ Whiplash is a great boxing movie, but fundamentally it got jazz wrong.

The Square gets the contemporary art world right. most films which feature ‘modern art’ are cinematic nails on a chalkboard. their sledgehammer-level subtlety criticising it is played for comedy. most are shallow caricatures drawn with thick marker pens and it just comes across as cheap. the square draws with fine, precise ink. details are pitch perfect; from the clothes of the artists, the press releases, the fonts used in the in-world artwork, the atmosphere that exists in galleries. it plays it straight. it plays the absolute truth… and the truth is more absurd than any caricature could ever be.

v early on the film tackles the ‘is it art?’ question it was always going to tackle. our central character, the curator of the museum, is questioned by a journalist about a wordy press release. he summaries it using her handbag as an example- ‘if you place an object in a museum, does it make this object a piece of art?’… the film is clearly interested in refocusing and repositioning the way we see everyday things, and as a result we see everything in the film as such. every major set piece feels somewhat like a performance work, all leading to the climactic monkey scene, which rocked my fucking world. it’s easily one of the best scenes that encapsulates what a film is about i’ve ever witnessed. the ‘presented’, eye-like cinematography gets in your head. when i left the cinema i wandered around central london for hours, looking at things in a refocussed way. most notably, and the most common response from EVERYONE i’ve spoken to about the film, you *really* start to notice how many homeless people there are, and how numb you’ve become to seeing the most desperate, terrible situation a human being can be in on a daily basis.

SO. MANY. FUCKING. SQUARES. count them. really makes you think about framing of things. the frame you’re watching the film in… it seems quite the opposite of ‘a sanctuary of trust and caring. within it we all share equal rights and obligations.’

side note/strange takeaway: anyone who grew up with only 1 older/young sibling gets this. the film REALLY captures what that relationship is like, how you come as a pair although you’re at very different stages in growing, how you both react to the world together, especially in traumatic situations.

the square is not so much a criticism of the contemporary art world, more of modern society, using the contemporary art world as a lens to see it through. besides, there’s no better metaphor for the way we live than an art gallery. solitude, awkward politeness, inherent hierarchy, exclusivity, a common understanding of the way things happen, not *really* looking at anything. one loud noise destroys all of that.

The English Patient (1996).