Event

Involuntary

In Case of No Emergency: The Films of Ruben Östlund

Feb 06

(2008, Sweden, 35mm, 98 min)

Friday, Feb 06 at 07:00PM
Friday, Feb 06 at 09:15PM

Five separate vignettes about (alternately dangerous and unsettlingly funny) ramifications of peer pressure are woven together, with scathingly satirical effects, in Involuntary.

In a modern and ultimately more sinister version of John Updike's "A&P," we meet two barely teenaged girls from the POV of their laptop camera as they painstakingly pose sexily in a Photobooth shoot. In a vignette of a middle-aged dinner party, the stubborn host's mishap with a firecracker gives new meaning to "losing face." In another scene set in an idyllic country field of high grass, a group of young men turn on one of their own (or perhaps turn one on) in a predatorial unleashing of repressed sexual tension. Östlund described his second feature as "a tragic comedy or a comic tragedy."

Part of our series In Case of No Emergencyget a series pass and see all of Östlund's films at a discount: $35 ($20 for Film Forum Members) >

Screens with:
Incident by a Bank
(2009, Sweden, 12 min)

Based on a real-life account of a bank robbery witnessed (and filmed) by two bystanders across the street, Östlund's study of surveillance earned the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at Berlinale. His slow zooms and pans across vast public spaces and his implicit question, "who watches the watchers?"may remind some viewers of Michael Haneke's Caché.