Ruben Ostlund
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Triangle of Sadness Star Dolly de Leon on Finally Letting “Whatever I Have in My Body or in My Heart” Out
Dolly de Leon is a Filipina veteran actor of film and TV who is now, due to her outstanding performance in Triangle of Sadness, being spoken about with words like “newcomer” and “breakthrough.” That might have something to do with the “I’m the captain now” nature of the role she plays in the Palme d’Or winning film. It’s like the character and the actor are both saying “I have arrived.” In this episode, she describes the dark place she was in right before auditioning for the part, how director Ruben Ostlund’s collaborative approach sparked her dynamic creativity, why watching the […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Oct 11, 2022 -
“I Had No Fear of Making it Too Much”: Ruben Östlund on His Cannes Palme d’Or-Winning Triangle of Sadness
Critics at Cannes were divided over Triangle of Sadness, some happily going along with its soak-the-rich ride on a yacht, others unmoved by a comic setpiece with wealthy passengers throwing up their oysters. The Competition jury, however, was crystal clear on the matter: director Ruben Östlund joined a select group of two-time Palme d’Or winners, adding this laurel to his previous one for The Square. As he did at the 2017 Cannes closing ceremony, after receiving his award, Östlund lead the audience in a primal scream. This time for the 48-year-old Swede it must felt like a relief as much […]
by Nicolas Rapold on May 31, 2022 -
Cannes 2022: Triangle of Sadness, Magdala, The Natural History of Destruction
Triangle of Sadness stands as the conclusion of what Ruben Östlund has recently deemed a trilogy about “being male in our times.” (It will not be a quartet.) As with the middle entry of said triptych (his 2017 Palme d’Or-winner The Square), Triangle is a movie of set pieces blanketed by a shapeshifting social critique obsessed with the myriad ways in which civilization and morality distort human life. Its initial target is the modeling industry, a chapter (the first of three, Östlund’s new favorite number) dominated by cheap shots at the scene’s stereotypical superficiality and cattiness, especially its particular gender […]
by Blake Williams on May 24, 2022 -
Critic’s Notebook NYFF: Call Me By Your Name, The Square, Western, Wonderstruck, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
For film writers who, like myself, remain chained to New York, NYFF marks the time of year when the much-hyped (or -hated) titles from the festival circuit finally pay us a visit. NYFF represents the last stop for many of the reliable sampler of films from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, and elsewhere before they enter theaters and launch their awards season runs. At last, we get to see the films the more important writers have already grown tired of debating on Twitter. From Sundance this year comes Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a coming-of-age queer romance set in 1980s Italy. A […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Oct 13, 2017 -
The Art of It All
Art and film share an essential trait: They are both about what the artist, or filmmaker, chooses to put in the frame. There are multiple frames — literal but also metaphoric ones — in the latest feature from Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund, his deviously sardonic The Square. The literal one is a 4-by-4 meter white-chalked box drawn on the grounds of the public space outside the film’s barely fictional X-Royal Museum. Within the frame of the film, the general public is invited to enter this work of conceptual art whenever they are in need of help — aid that passersby […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
Cannes Dispatch #2: Faces Places, Claire’s Camera, The Square
At some point the past year, Rive Gauche icon Agnès Varda and French photographer JR went on a road trip through rural France documenting whatever locals they encountered and, lucky for us, decided to make a movie about it. The main activity of their excursion involved producing pieces for JR’s ongoing Inside Out project, wherein he takes portraits of the subjects he happens upon (or lets them enter into his van-cum-photobooth to capture their own images), prints them out at a scale somewhere between life-size and mammoth, and then pastes the images onto a building or transportation vessel that is meaningful […]
by Blake Williams on May 22, 2017 -
“I Have One Camera Position Each Day”: Force Majeure Director Ruben Östlund
Structurally, tonally and formally indebted to Roy Andersson — not least in opening and closing to the sardonically mournful strains of Benny Andersson’s “Briggens blåögda blonda kapten,” along the lines of the other Andersson’s ever-present ambient musical commentary — Ruben Östlund’s second feature Involuntary lays out five situations in which people behave contrary to how they should. The entire thrust of Östlund’s multi-film project is summed up early, with an elementary school classroom recreation of Solomon Asch’s conformity experiment. A subject is asked to identify which line of several on a cardboard display is the longest. Everyone in the room says the shortest line is the longest, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 5, 2015 -
The Look of Defeat: Force Majeure‘s Director and Producer React to their Oscar Snub
Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure is one of my top films of the year, so I share — albeit not to the same degree — the disappointment of Ostlund and producer Erik Hemmendorff over the film’s failure to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. But it is their reaction, not mine, that is liveblogged, as they video’d their watching the nominations and then their post-announcement reaction. The joke — if it is indeed one — is contingent on you having seen Force Majeure. However, even if you haven’t, the relative banality of the video, which documents the paltry […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 16, 2015 -
Freeze Out: Ruben Östlund on Force Majeure
Amidst the red-carpet mayhem of any major international film festival, critics tend to adopt a sort of cinematic shorthand — a private language of allusions and descriptors. It didn’t take long for Force Majeure to earn its seemingly ready-made sobriquet: “the avalanche movie,” further confirmed by the film’s theatrical poster. Force Majeure does indeed revolve around an avalanche — a controlled blast in the mountains of a ski resort in the French Alps, watched by a vacationing Swedish family with awe until, as it hurtles its way toward the restaurant terrace where they are enjoying their breakfast, awe suddenly curdles […]
by Calum Marsh on Oct 20, 2014 -
Cannes 2014: Mr. Turner, Salt of the Earth, Force Majeure and the Art of First Impressions
“What’s your elevator pitch?” people ask — the same people who’d recoil backwards, their body language flashing danger signals, if you actually collared them in an actual elevator and launched into a pitch of your movie. Indeed, it’s a paradox of the film business that the smooth-talking hustler is held up as some kind of model when most film industry types would prefer an approach by someone genuine — personable, even — who understands both the cultural and the transactional nature of their business. I watched one exec from an established production and distribution company last week at the 2014 […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 26, 2014
