Rebellious wick and scathing humor, the Swede Ruben Östlund has imposed in a handful of films his caustic eye and his taste for satire, to the point of convincing the Cannes jury to award him a second Palme d’or on Saturday, with ‘Without filter’ .
Five years after being rewarded for ‘The Square’, on artistic circles, the director packed the Croisette with this enjoyable satire of the super-rich and luxury.
In the film, Östlund delivers an uncompromising critique of capitalism and its excesses. Raised by a communist mother, defining himself as a ‘socialist’, the Swede did not give in to the ease of ‘describing the rich as bad people’ but rather to ‘understand their behavior’.
In a kind of inverted ‘Titanic’ (the film takes place during a luxury cruise), where the weakest are not necessarily the losers, he dissects the springs of class from top to bottom: the rich against the poor, but also men against women, and whites against blacks.
The director had known international fame with ‘Snow Therapy’ (2014), destroying the modern family with a father fleeing an avalanche, his mobile phone in his hand, but leaving his children in danger.
The film won the 2014 Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes. This tragicomedy had also opened the doors of the American film industry to the Swede.
In 2017, he had the audience of the Palais des Festivals in Cannes scream with joy by winning the 2017 Palme d’Or for ‘The Square’. For this film, he had surrounded himself with the American Elisabeth Moss (‘Mad Men’), the Briton Dominic West (‘The Wire’) and the Danish Claes Bang, who holds the leading role.
Skiing and YouTube
The latter played Christian, the director of a museum of contemporary art who is preparing an exhibition on tolerance but comes up against his own limits in this area.
“The film is interested in the way in which we consider and oppose individual responsibility and that of society” and examines “how we take care of each other”, explained the director to Variety magazine.
For this inveterate fan of Youtube, it is the situations more than the characters that make the film. The Swedish press described him as ‘a kleptomaniac. He steals situations from his own life, those of his friends and, not least, from YouTube to make fictions out of them.
Seasonal in the Alps
Born in Gothenburg 48 years ago, this director with blue eyes studied directing and still lives there today. He shot there, as well as in Stockholm and Berlin, part of ‘The Square’, his fifth feature film and the first in English.
With his looks of a young first, this caustic arrived at the cinema after having made ski films, one of his passions, when he was seasonal in the Alps in the 90s.
‘I have kept from these years an incredible perseverance. We were outside every day from December to April. We have three times more shooting days than when we shoot a feature film,” he recalled in an interview with the TT Spektra news agency in 2013.
His determination also goes back to childhood, when by his own admission, he behaved like a ‘dictator imbued with a certain notion of justice’.
When he had the same take repeated forty times, he half-heartedly apologized.
/ATS