Audiences at glitzy film festivals like Cannes enjoy nothing more than seeing their own smug liberal complacency and sickly bourgeois values ruthlessly skewered on screen. So it is great to have Ruben Östlund, the impish Swedish provocateur behind Force Majeure (2014) and The Square (2017), back in the main competition this year with another deliciously bitter social satire, Triangle of Sadness. Titled after a fashion-world term for the small cluster of wrinkles directly above the nose, Östlund’s latest Palm d’Or contender begins as a fairly lightweight critique of the modelling industry, but slowly builds into a panoramic takedown of capitalism, patriarchy, tax evasion, structural racism, the class system, white privilege, Instagram influencers and pretentious fine dining. This wild ride starts like an art-house remake of Zoolander (2001), but ends up gatecrashing Buñuel, Brecht and Godard territory.
As with most of Östlund’s films, Triangle of Sadness feels a little baggy and disjointed in places, with an over-generous running time of 149 minutes. His satirical targets are broad and obvious, his angry brickbats fairly familiar. But this is also a roaringly funny feast of a movie which boasts a highly engaging international cast, powerhouse performances, elegant visual choreography and some of the director’s most biting comic riffs to date. Following his multiple prize-winning, Oscar-nominated, Palm d’Or success with The Square, this latest scabrous scattershot farce should find a healthy global audience of self-loathing bourgeois film fans following its high-profile Cannes debut.
Östlund credits his fashion photographer wife Sina Görtz for opening him up to the rich satirical potential of the modelling world. Triangle of Sadness begins with a withering commentary on the hollow egalitarian posturing seen at runway shows (“Cynicism Masquerading As Optimism” is one sublime promotional slogan) and the absurd etiquette of photo shoots: models smiling and tactile for cheaper outlets like H&M, haughty and disdainful for more upscale brands like Balenciaga. These barbed insights feel especially acute in Cannes, with its daily catwalk parade of beautiful people in designer evening wear, not to mention the prominent Balenciaga boutique just 200 metres from the main festival hub.
The film’s opening chapter is tightly focussed on Carl (affable young British rising star Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (South African Charlbi Dean), a model couple whose brittle relationship crackles with electric tension. Although she earns more than he does, Yaya still expects Carl to pay for her fancy restaurant meals, leading to a volley of passive-aggressive insults that Östlund hilariously extends to the edge of toe-curling awkwardness and beyond. There are echoes of Force Majeure in this lacerating exchange, digging away at buried questions of exploitation and manipulation that few couples are comfortable addressing. The young leads do great work here, playing the characters as plausibly selfish products of their shallow social milieu rather than simplistic, odious monsters.
The midsection of Triangle of Sadness takes place on board a luxury yacht cruise, essentially a floating boutique hotel where Carl and Yaya join a colourful guest list of genteel arms dealers, demanding divas, lonely bachelor millionaires, sleazy oligarchs, trophy wives and more. Like the train in Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), this ship of fools serves as a concrete metaphor for the class system, with uniformed service staff dancing to the whims of their moneyed guests on the upper decks while lowly crew members, most of them non-white, toil away unseen in the bowels of the boat.
Adding fuel to this raging bonfire of vanity and privilege is the ship’s loose-cannon American captain (Woody Harrelson, on mighty form), an alcoholic Marxist who loathes his wealthy guests, gleefully punishing them by hosting a special ceremonial banquet during a violent thunderstorm. This majestic comic set-piece escalates into a nightmarish slapstick riot of gluttony, seasickness, vomit, injury and exploding toilets. The evening climaxes with Harrelson’s sozzled skipper and boorish Russian fertiliser tycoon (a gloriously uncouth Zlatko Buri?), drunkenly debating socialism and its discontents over the boat’s public address system. This inspired carnival of excess is one of Östlund’s career-best sequences to date, a masterclass in sustained comic anarchy.
After two strong opening chapters, Triangle of Sadness stumbles a little in its final section, in which a group of survivors from the cruise wash up on a remote island following a dramatic shipwreck. With food scarce and most of these pampered guests clueless about fending for themselves, class structures that applied on the boat are overturned. Suddenly in demand for her rare skills at catching and cooking fish, on-board toilet cleaner Abigail (Filipino actor and Lav Diaz regular Dolly de Leon) begins to flex her emerging power at the top of a newly formed matriarchal society, which extends to making the males in the group into her underlings and sexual playthings.
This role-reversal political allegory is a fascinating conceit, but Östlund seems to lose focus here, slackening the pace with too many rambling digressions and too few big laughs. All the same, even with this disappointingly muffled finale, Triangle of Sadness is still one of the high-energy peaks of Cannes so far, a fantastic voyage across an ocean of blood and vomit and toxic satirical bile. Delicious.
Director, screenwriter: Ruben Östlund
Cast: Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean, Woody Harrelson, Dolly de Leon, Vicki Berlin, Henrik Dorsin, Zlatko Buri?, Jean-Christophe Folly, Iris Berben
Producers: Erik Hemmendorff, Philippe Bober
Cinematography: Fredrik Wenzel
Editing: Ruben Östlund, Mikel Cee Karlsson
Production design: Josefin Asberg
Production company: Plattform Produktion (Sweden)
World sales: Coproduction Office
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In English, Swedish
149 minutes
