Perverse and provocative yet bland and uneven, Ostlund’s low-fi debut feature is at best a curiosity, a Roy Andersson-meets-Ulrich Seidl series of docu-fictive vignettes.
Review #2,765
Dir. Ruben Ostlund
2004 | Sweden | Drama | 85 min | 1.37:1 | Swedish
Not rated – likely to be M18 for some mature themes, coarse language and sexual references
Cast: Erik Rutstrom, Ola Sandstig, Britt-Marie Andersson
Plot: A 12-year-old boy making basic punk songs, grown men playing with guns, a neurotic woman with euphoric happiness targeting self-destruction – a Swedish everyday life you’ve never seen before.
Awards: –
Source: Triangelfilm
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Outsiders of Society; Defying Social Norms
Narrative Style: Straightforward/Vignette-Style
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: General Arthouse
Viewed: MUBI
Spoilers: No
Ruben Ostlund is now very much a household name in the European arthouse circuit with two consecutive Cannes Palme d’Or wins in The Square (2017) and Triangle of Sadness (2022).
It is hard to imagine the filmmaker he would become if we journeyed all the back to his debut feature in 2004 called The Guitar Mongoloid. His penchant for provocation had been there since the get-go, but the technical and artistic flourishes only came later.
In The Guitar Mongoloid, Ostlund adopts a low-fi aesthetic that would have felt right at home on YouTube 240p setting. (YouTube officially launched only a year later in 2005.)
As such, there is a heightened sense of ‘home video’ realism, much like a documentary made on the sly as Ostlund films the quaint residents of a Swedish town as if without their knowledge.
But this is a piece of fiction and these are actors, non-professional or otherwise, as they adorn various vignettes that may not necessarily connect with one another.
“Here we sit like crazies and smoke.”
What’s similar is how these characters act, mostly against social norms, such as a gang of boys who hate bicycles enough to deviously fling them into the river. Or a boy with his guitar who befriends a guitar-loving adult as they sing expletive-laden songs together.
There is even a tense scene (so tense that I had to look away) where three men play a game of Russian roulette with a pistol that may or may not be loaded.
The Guitar Mongoloid is perverse and provocative yet also bland and uneven. It has a few brilliant moments such as the scene of an unorthodox balloon made out of helium-inflated trash bags floating above curious onlookers in the streets (an artistic antithesis to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 short, The Red Balloon perhaps?).
However, it feels too loosely episodic to sustain any real interest, not to mention its conspicuous lack of sentiment. I would describe The Guitar Mongoloid as Roy Andersson-meets-Ulrich Seidl, and I don’t mean it that complimentarily.
Grade: B-
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 