Play

PLAY   **

Ruben Östlund

2011

IDEA:  A group of black immigrant kids in Sweden carry out an elaborate scheme in which they gain the trust of middle-class white kids to rob them of their cellphones and other belongings.

BLURB:  The children are definitely watching us, but who’s watching them? That’s a question posed heavy-handedly and pleonastically by Play, a self-serious Euro-arthouse provocation masquerading as profound sociological study. The film comes unashamedly from the Michael Haneke playbook of clinically-observed cruelty, its gaze trained coldly on the complacency and moral apathy of capitalist bourgeois society. Like his pitiless Austrian idol, Östlund favors long, often static master-shots that echo the impassive indifference of his characters to the violence and inequity occurring around them. Sometimes, the camera’s creeping pans and zooms suggest the automatism of mass surveillance, signifying a state apparatus void of human compassion. In Östlund’s dourly cynical formulation, we become aligned with that acedia and inaction; moreover, we’re asked to confront our racial and class biases as we witness lower-class black immigrant children systematically deceive and rob middle-class white kids. But what, exactly, does this seemingly tendentious narrative want us to understand? That immigrants can be criminals, and that liberal piety conceals this truth? Östlund’s aim is dubious at best; it doesn’t help that his characters feel more like pawns in an experiment than actual people, inhabiting a world that operates according to its imperious creator’s disingenuously manipulative rules. Formally impressive though it is, Play is a smug, overlong slog, displaying precious little of the dramatic tautness or biting dark comedy Östlund would master just three years later.