There is a culty YouTube video shot three years ago on the laptop camera of Ruben Ostlund. It shows the film director listening live as the nominations for the Academy Awards are announced from Los Angeles. The tension mounts as they approach the foreign film category. Alas, Force Majeure from Sweden isn’t nominated. Ostlund disappears off screen to sob and mewl. This year, there was a sequel to the video, but with a happier ending: the director’s latest film The Square was nominated for an Oscar.
These mini-movies, like the rest of Ostlund’s oeuvre, are funny but subtly savage. He is a provocateur who trades in discomfort. You watch with your toes knotted. In Play (2011) a group of black teenagers inflict psychological torment on two white kids and (to complicate things) an Asian. In Force Majeure (2014) a man on a skiing holiday flees an avalanche, shamefully abandoning his family and earning the vituperation of his wife.
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