“If you have a conversation at the table and everyone agrees, what’s the point of arguing? “, asks Ruben Ostlund, camped in front of a café crème. The man smiles. “I like to build consensus. It is art’s job to raise new questions, cinema is interesting when it questions. ” Two consecutive films – The square (2017) et Without filter (Triangle of Sadness2022) -, two Golden Palms … Who is this enthusiastic, hopping Swede whose uncomfortable films are controversial and go against convention?
“What interests me is the defecthe says. I try to challenge the moral and ethical compass that each of us has, to create the dilemma that can make us suddenly lose direction. And what interests me is not when we get out of it but when we get lost. “
Ruben Ostlund grew up on Styrsö, a small island off the coast of Gothenburg in western Sweden. His parents, teachers, settled there the year of his birth, in 1974. Those who participated in the student movements of the 1960s were fiercely leftist, in the midst of a religious community on the island. His father comes from Stockholm, son of an opera singer and grandson of Egon Ostlund, king of the Halmstadgruppen. This collective of artists embraced Cubism in the 1920s and then introduced surrealism into Swedish modern art. On the mother’s side, it’s more difficult. His mother comes from the north, on the border with Finland, where his grandfather works at customs.
Ruben is 4 years old when his parents separate. His brother, eight years his senior, leaves with his father. He himself then grew up face to face with this mother who still claims to be a communist and paints as an amateur. Bad for good: “Whatever I did, my mother supported me, he says. It has always been “fantastic”. I was also allowed to criticize his paintings. I learned very early to trust myself. “
Taste for the spectacular
At 20, he who practices skiing and climbing leaves for the French Alps for the winter season. He then came up with the idea of proposing to a small production company in Gothenburg to make films about these extreme skiers who go down extravagant slopes and jump in all directions. Watching them twenty-five years later has something reassuring, but that’s where his cinema was born. He will do it for five years. When he joined the Gothenburg film school, he brought his taste for the performative and the spectacular, which required both long (to hide nothing and show the feat) and multiple shots. Ruben Ostlund can repeat a scene more than thirty times, say, exhausted, those who have acted for him. It seems inexhaustible.
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