Art-world satire of ‘The Square’ blooms into deeper look at disconnect between rich and poor

Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s dark comedy-drama “The Square,” which won the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, starts as a satire on the modern-art world — a big fish in a small barrel — but grows into a stinging examination of how well, or how poorly, we treat our fellow human beings.

The day starts badly for Christian (Claes Bang), the urbane head curator of a major contemporary art museum in Stockholm, when somebody nicks his wallet and cellphone. His assistant, Michael (Christopher Laessø), goes online to find the cellphone’s tracking beacon, and they discover the phone is in a tenement building in the poorer part of the city.

Christian and Michael write up a threatening flier, which Christian puts in the mail slots of every apartment in the building, demanding the thief drop off his belongings at a local 7-Eleven. Christian gets back his stuff, but also gets another problem: a kid who lives in the tenement block, demanding Christian apologize for calling him a thief.

Meanwhile, other problems pile up for Christian. A new exhibit — an illuminated square, 4 meters to a side, meant as “a sanctuary of trust and caring” — turns out to be a tricky marketing challenge in a viral-video world. And an encounter with Anne (“Mad Men” alumna Elizabeth Moss), an American reporter, takes an interesting detour.

Östlund, who wrote and directed, doesn’t bring the same focused intensity he gave his previous film, the ski-vacation-gone-awry drama “Force Majeure.” He does engineer some riveting set pieces and wry commentary, none more arresting than a museum gala banquet that’s interrupted by a shirtless performance artist (Terry Notary, who played one of the chimps in the “Planet of the Apes” movies) behaving like a gorilla.

And while Christian, played by Bang with an incisive wit, fights to make the art in his museum connect with people, Östlund shows a chance at connection passing him (and us) by every day. The gulf between the rich, like Christian and his museum’s benefactors, and the poor — whether the tenement residents he avoids talking to or the homeless people he dodges on the street — has seldom been depicted with more care and understanding, pushing “The Square” closer to the utopian ideal Christian pretends to espouse.