Incident by a Bank (2009)
Cast: Bahador Foladi, Ramtin Parvaneh, Leif Edlund Johansson
Director: Ruben Östlund
Country: Sweden
Genre: Action | Comedy | Crime | Drama
Websites: TIFF
Editor’s Notes: The following review is part of our coverage for TIFF’s In Case of No Emergency: The Films of Ruben Östlund which runs from April 9th to April 14th. For more information on upcoming TIFF film series visit http://tiff.net and follow TIFF on Twitter at @TIFF_NET.
Ruben Östlund has the ability to create a realistic scenario and let it play out organically to explore the behaviors that emerge when people are presented with an uncomfortable or unusual event. Rather than using the tricks of filmmaking and storytelling to fabricate hyperrealistic drama, he strips an event down to its basest elements to craft something that more closely approximates a real human experience. In Incident by a Bank he uses a bank robbery to explore the ubiquitous drudgery of life and shows us that even in traumatic events we are still the same person we are in everyday life, we just happen to be dealing with unusual stimuli for a moment in time. A person doesn’t suddenly discover that they had hidden action star qualities buried beneath their business attire and polite smile because they’ve been presented with a dramatic situation.
Ruben Östlund has the ability to create a realistic scenario and let it play out organically to explore the behaviors that emerge when people are presented with an uncomfortable or unusual event.
Incident by a Bank uses static camera placement that puts us at a comfortable distance from the action, watching from afar with the casual indifference of a security camera as a bank robbery takes place behind walls that we never get to see behind. The camera looks down from a height that gives us no human perspective of the event, intensifying the intentional disconnect and removing our ability to empathize or judge. We can only watch with morbid curiosity, tilting our heads to get a better look at shadows through the windows but are given no satisfaction as we observe from the same vantage as a person watching from an apartment building a block away.
People converse nonchalantly from a safe distance as they speculate about what is going on, but they are as clueless as we are despite their proximity to the incident. The action is granted no more significance in the frame than the park bench across the street or the busses full of partying college students that periodically block our view of the bank as they make their way down the road. Life alteration isn’t typically the result of our proximity to a major event despite our need to associate ourselves with something larger than life, using our being there as false currency even if we weren’t directly involved with the action. We see ourselves as possessing the incontestable authority of firsthand experience; we’ve been there, we’ve seen things, we’ve breathed the rarified air of visceral experience and lived to tell the tale.
In a single extended take, Incident by a Bank unfolds an intricately choreographed series of events with the casual nonchalance of everyday life. Ruben Östlund recreates a dramatic event without the conceits of dramatization, giving neither the robbers nor the bystanders falsely amplified courage or cleverness. This is life as it actually happens, and with our masterful ability to contextualize overly dramatic events into our own boring framework even something as sensational as a bank robbery becomes as insignificant as any other workday distraction as long as we feel that our safety is relatively undisturbed. Though when it comes time to tell the story to a friend…
In a single extended take, Incident by a Bank unfolds an intricately choreographed series of events with the casual nonchalance of everyday life. Ruben Östlund recreates a dramatic event without the conceits of dramatization, giving neither the robbers nor the bystanders falsely amplified courage or cleverness.
