Ruben Ostlund’s ‘Triangle of Sadness’: Film Review | Cannes 2022
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After winning the top prize in Un Certain Regard with his best film, Force Majeure, and the Palme d’Or with his graduation to the main competition, The Square, Sweden’s most sardonic social commentator, Ruben Östlund, returns to Cannes with the disappointingly blunt satire of class, capitalism and status, Triangle of Sadness. The title refers to the Botox-ready space between the eyebrows on fashion models in a tantalizing opening that’s funny even if it takes swings at low-hanging fruit. But the target only grows more numbingly obvious when a pair of beautiful influencers score a free trip on a luxury yacht that devolves into catastrophe and upends the natural order.
While Östlund stuck close to home skewering the elite art world and the insularity of wealthy liberal taste-makers in The Square, the film outstayed its welcome and became increasingly scattershot as it dragged on. That defect is magnified in the writer-director’s first English-language project, a work divided into three parts with their own chapter headings, only the first of them somewhat incisive.
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An amusing prologue introduces Carl (Harris Dickinson) in a crowd of shirtless male models being warmed up by a smarmy flirt who tests their range by having them display their “grumpy” face, as in unapproachable Balenciaga couture, and their “happy” face, the one used for fun, affordable H&M.
But Part 1: Carl and Yaya is less about Carl’s place in the fashion industry — he shot a glossy international perfume campaign but is now back to cattle-call castings — than his frustrating relationship with fellow model Yaya (Charlbi Dean). The fact that the runway star out-earns him by a considerable margin yet sits scrolling through her Instagram feed and ignoring the check at the end of an expensive restaurant meal ruffles Carl’s feathers. He protests that he wants them to be equals, not fall into stereotypical gender roles. Yaya just thinks it’s “unsexy” to talk about money.
The gnawing insecurities of the postfeminist male were at the heart of Force Majeure, and Östlund initially appears to be returning to that subject in a negotiation both thorny and droll as Carl is bloodlessly castrated by Yaya. She concedes that she’s manipulative, but could be only half-joking when she says their relationship is good for business, helping to grow her Insta followers. Still, Carl vows to make her love him.
The couple’s beauty is a form of currency, landing them a free cruise on a $250 million vessel in Part 2: The Yacht, in exchange for social media exposure, which narcissistic Yaya is more than happy to provide. She even poses with a forkful of pasta despite declining to take a bite because she’s gluten intolerant.
Östlund continues to track Carl and Yaya’s petty tiffs and jealousies, but he’s distracted by the foibles of the super-rich paying customers and the staff trained to fulfill their every desire. In one of the establishing scenes, a supply of Nutella is delivered by helicopter drop. The writer-director demarcates the strict lines separating the squeaky-clean, white stewards, supervised by Paula (Vicki Berlin), from the more ethnically diverse maintenance staff and crew, who are discouraged from direct interaction with the guests.
The problem with this change of setting is that the billionaires are drawn with zero subtlety — a genteel Brit couple (Oliver Ford Davies and Amanda Walker) who made their fortune in “precision engineering” (their top-selling product is hand grenades, ever since the UN killed the landmine trade); a Scandi app developer (Henrik Dorsin) sniffing around hot babes; and a Russian oligarch (Zlatko Burić) who cornered the European fertilizer market in the ‘90s, making him literally King Shit. He travels with his wife (Sunnyi Melles) and mistress (Carolina Gynning).
The movie goes off the rails as it slides into gross-out farce, with the Captain’s Dinner coinciding with rough weather that sends guests dashing from the dining room with the contents of their stomachs erupting. Or their bowels. Likewise, the vessel’s overtaxed toilet system. Any lowbrow fun this schadenfreude spectacle might have generated is pretty much trampled by grotesque excess from which the movie never finds its way back.
Even more on the nose than the puke party is the belabored dialectic between the Marxist ship’s Captain, Thomas (Woody Harrelson), and the vulgar Russian capitalist, Dimitriy, the last two men standing at the end of the aborted dinner. A lush who has emerged from his cabin only reluctantly, Thomas trades political maxims and whiskey shots with the Russian, which ends with the Captain reading from The Communist Manifesto over the yacht’s loudspeaker system before the real disaster strikes. Harrelson is wasted, in every sense.
The events of the final section, Part 3: The Island, are perhaps ironically suggested by meaningless slogans like “Everyone’s Equal Now,” projected on a wall at the runway show Yaya works in the opening. For reasons best kept unspoiled, a small group from the yacht ends up stranded on what appears to be a deserted island, including Carl and Yaya. While Paula attempts to maintain control, it’s painfully obvious that the pampered group has no survival skills, which allows lowly toilet manager Abigail (Dolly De Leon, delightful) to flip the hierarchy.
As facile as Triangle of Sadness becomes, Östlund at least provides full-circle follow-through when beauty and sex once again become bartering assets and a late gag mocks the global obsession with branded luxury goods. But this is a glib movie, self-indulgent in its extended running time and far too amused with its easy digs at wealth and privilege.
Dickinson and modeling industry recruit Dean provide an agreeably absurd center to all this, coaxing sly humor out of Carl and Yaya’s entitlement and their gradual awakening to the realities of a world outside their bubble. But as the film expands beyond them, it grows increasingly tiresome, demonstrating that you can’t satirize shallowness with shallowness.
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