Week #13 2020: Play
The next few films I’m planning to write about are all ‘provocative’ in one way or another, starting with Ruben Östlund's Play (Sweden; 2011). In general, I’m very suspicious of films that aim to be ‘provocative’. ‘Provocative’ and ‘controversial’ are often used interchangeably, but there’s an important gap between them. Provocative art intends to find and press upon a tender point. Controversy is all about reception, how sharply that tenderness is felt in the audience. Controversial works can be provocative, but there’s also a broad field of works that are controversial but not provocative. Martin Scorsese’ The Last Temptation of Christ comes from a place of deep spiritual enquiry, but ended up being controversial (more often than not, controversial films are most reviled by those who have not seen them, outrage unshackled by engaging with intention). Film, as a mass medium, is most likely to fall into this grouping: the place where an artist’s idiosyncratic thinking meets an unintended audience who is not following their train of thought. Of course, there are also works that are provocative but not controversial. Without breaking outside of the standard audience of cultured people, your work fails to light the touch paper of controversy.
I’m suspicious of controversial and provocative work, partly because the ‘provocative’ elements usually rely on the diminishing returns of prodding sex, religion and gender, testing boundaries that most of Western liberal society hasn’t shrunk from since the 1960s. There are parts of the world that Lars Von Trier must fear to tread, but they’re unlikely to be coming to the arthouse to see tamer fare either. More often than not, ‘controversial’ work imagines another viewer, more easily offended, who we can feel superior to. ‘Provocative’ sits next to its modern sibling ‘problematic’ as a safe way of pointing at an issue without taking the risk of unpacking it. But if we are in the business of slaying pieties, we should also be comfortable to name them.
So Play, what is it about? Five black teenagers approach two white teenagers and one Asian teenager in a well-ordered modern shopping precinct and ask them the time. One of the black teens claims he recognises the white teen's mobile phone: it has the same scratches as one recently stolen from his brother. Having seen them play the same con in the film's opening sequence on another pair of blonde Swedish boys, we know this is a ruse. They take the boys on a convoluted trip, claiming they plan to check the phone with the brother, who never materialises. Instead, the group becomes separated when relations of one of the victims of a previous scams attack them. They reunite and hold a race: winner takes all the other side's valuables. Cheating in the race, the black teens leave with the booty, enjoying pizzas while making prank calls to their victims’ parents. It’s supposed to be based on a true story, though I struggled to find much evidence of that beyond repetitions of that press release nugget.
Controversial work is more likely to be picking at the scab of established pieties; provocative work is more like opening a new wound, a taboo that has become invisible. In Play, Sweden’s liberal democracy is cracked open like an egg. Able to be egalitarian as long as society remains uniform, the film shows what happens when people aren't even able to speak about race. ‘You go and speak to them John,’ the white boys urge their Asian friend. ‘Why me?’ he insists, knowing the answer. They drop the subject, unable to admit that they see him as having more in common than themselves. The adults in the film fail to react to any of the teens behaviour. Their only response to this contagion in the clean surface of the shopping mall is to ignore it. Nevertheless, they impose themselves on those around them. Although it might not feel like it to their victims, as the title has it, it’s about play, the Emperor striding confidently in new clothes, reversing the microaggressions and suspicions put upon them behind the surface beneficence (one great scene has the boys tease a white dreadlocked man who is bopping along to Aswad in his headphones). The culmination of the film comes when two parents of boys who fell foul of the game, approach one of the gang’s ringleaders, sitting with his blameless younger brother. When one father verbally abuses the boy and takes his mobile phone from him, a pregnant bystander intervenes.
He: “You’re harassing us.”
She: “You harassed two young immigrants.”
He: “What does being an immigrant have to do with anything?”
She: “A kid and an immigrant? He’s twice as vulnerable, so it matters.”
He: “If you say no one’s allowed to criticise what immigrants do, that’s just twisted reverse racism.”
All this happens away from the boy in question, who has run off by this point. This gets to the heart of the issue with Play. Like all good provocative work, it successfully implicates its audience in the situations it's focusing on. It's shot almost entirely in long takes that put us in the position of bystander, either from the viewpoint of a disinterested fellow commuter or the travelling mechanical eye of a CCTV lens (Play was one of the first films to make use of the ultra-hi res RED camera to crop into a wide angle to create new framings). As I watch, I thought about other incidents I’ve not intervened in, either from fear of escalating or from simple fear.
Yet the biggest problems in Play’s provocation lie in hitting this target so thoroughly: the complacent bourgeois audience comfortable enough to be able to visit the cinema not just for fun, but also to be unsettled. In that old formula that art should ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’, its scales fall too heavily on the latter end, forgetting the former. What do we know about the lives of the boys, of other people of colour? That’s not within the film’s imaginative capacity. Nor does it imagine that a Swedish immigrant might be a potential viewer, and what they might make of this characterisation. One could argue that Östlund only wants to write what he knows, as a white middle class director. Yet, by selecting the ‘man bites dog’ scenario of black teens actually doing the thing that racist assumptions always suspect them of, he reinforces those stereotypes. To take a counterexample, Thomas Vinterberg was in a position to talk about the vanishingly rare topic of false child abuse accusation in The Hunt, having given such full voice to survivors of abuse in Festen. Östlund may see himself as an affiliate of the boys – they’re both merry pranksters, not worried about bothering their audience in order to have their fun – but they are never more than germs in a moral problem of liberal society. In punching up, he also ends up punching down. They may be exceptions rather than the rule, but you'd never know that from watching the film. Östlund is far more successful when only dealing with the moral quandaries of his own milieu, as in his excellent Force Majeure. There’s a version of this film where all the teens are white that probes more elemental questions about play, psychopathy and complacency, but the tendentious route was seemingly too seductive.
That Ostlund’s film is fairly racist (intentionally or not) isn’t surprising: every time you step into provocation, the difficulty of sticking the landing increases. Like taking a shit in the middle of your enemy’s carpet, it’s equally likely you’ll track it to your own door. One approach to avoid this is to take an ‘equal opportunities offender’ route, like South Park. Private Eye view it as a measure of success that they receive ‘Your bias offends me enough to cancel my long-standing subscription’ letters in equal parts from left and right. Overall though, why produce work when you have this cynical a view of society? What hope is there in arguing with people you take such a dim view of? Richard Brody’s excellent piece here ties together this “haughty, self-righteous and humanly challenged cynicism” of Östlund, Michael Haneke and Yorgos Lanthimos. Haneke has a lot to answer for. His audience hug him only more tightly as the years pass, so happy to see an imagined other pricked once again. He’s been forced into hollow repetition of previous arguments, flagging up the redundancy of continuing to make ‘provocative’ work. Provocation doesn’t do long. What was once provocative becomes commonplace, then orthodoxy, then finally hollow tradition.
Recommendations
If you’re struggling – like I am – to watch a full film at the moment, Belgian stop motion animation This Magnificent Cake! is available to stream now and is only 45 minutes long. Full of charming craft, but put to unnerving, complex ends that probe Belgium’s colonial expeditions in Africa.
The soothing music of Westerman, starting with this one.
I’ve put together a list of films I’d like to watch under lock down (yes, I know, Haneke’s Happy Games is high up there!). Let me know if you want to watch one together and we can discuss afterwards.