'The Square': Why This Award-Winning Art-World Satire Will Make You Squirm

How a Swedish filmmaker, a Danish actor, Elisabeth Moss and a man who imitates monkeys made one of the can't-miss movies of the year.

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We should probably start with the muscular, shirtless man perched on a banquet table, shrieking like an animal and terrorizing folks at a $5,000-a-plate dinner.

There will be many scenes in The Square, the new pitch-black comedy from Swedish director Ruben Östlund about a museum director in moral free-fall and which hits theaters this weekend, that will provoke, push buttons and provide postscreening argument fodder: a man with Tourette's screaming obscenities during a Q&A; a social media team's viral video that goes way, way overboard; Elisabeth Moss and Danish actor Claes Bang vigorously fighting over a used condom. But the sequence that will almost assuredly cause the most commotion, the one that really sticks with you after seeing this extraordinary satire of social mores and the snooty high-art scene that won the top prize at Cannes last spring, is the donor event. 

A performance artist is invited to showcase "a piece" for the amusement and delight of a museum's wealthy, well-dressed contributors. His forte is to pretend to be an ape, complete with metal arm extensions that let him replicate a a simian gait. He is extremely dedicated to this predatory primate act. And for over 10 minutes, viewers watch this "savage" knock glasses out of people's hands, go after bystanders and [gulp] look for a mate while a crowd in formalwear try to remain as still as possible. To say that the showstopping set piece is nerve-racking would be putting it mildly.

"You'd be surprised what you can find when you Google 'monkey imitation,'" Östlund says, crossing his legs and glancing over at Terry Notary. The two are sitting in a hotel room the day after their movie screened at the Toronto Film Festival; the latter is a motion-capture artist best known for his work on the Planet of the Apes films. "The original idea was to make the performance artist some sort of G.G. Allin-like figure, which seemed a bit extreme. But I've always been fascinated by the idea of people acting like animals. So I went online and ended up finding Terry's demo reel, where he's demonstrating the difference between an ape, a gorilla, a chimpanzee, an orangutan. That was when I thought: Ok, this internationally recognized artist is pretending to be a wild beast. What happens when he enters a room full of people in tuxedos?"

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