Repeatedly along the “Triangle of Sadness” nervous sounds are heard that contribute to the intentional irritation in the situations they accompany – wipers screeching on the windshield of a taxi, a pesky fly, the cry of an invisible baby, donkey girls. The Swedish director Ruben Ostlund likes to stick arrows in the western society and see what happens, and this time he sends them everywhere. As always, the conclusions are open to interpretation and do not go down the throat easily.
“Triangle of Sorrows” is his first film in five years, and like his previous film, “The Square”, it also won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It is a rare achievement that indicates more about the state of world cinema than the greatness of the film. In my opinion, this is not a masterpiece – his early films, up to “Higher Power”, were sharper and more cohesive – but it is a film full of all good, or full of shit, depending on the point of view. It is not particularly deep or challenging, but it is witty and very entertaining for almost its entire 150 minutes.
The “triangle of sadness” is that part of the forehead, between the eyebrows, that we tend to contract when we are not at peace. This, at least, is explained at the beginning of the film by a representative of a company that examines models for an advertising campaign. It’s an image for the tension that drives the film, between the pretense of ease and the truths that threaten to erupt. Carl (the very handsome Harris Dickinson from “Crawfish Song”) is a model who looks perfect to the viewers, but to the examiners he is no longer who he was three years ago. And in general, he deals with the one field where men earn less than women. This contributes to the tension between him and his model girlfriend Yaya (the late Charlby Dean). The first episode of the film examines their relationship through a tense dialogue about who pays in a restaurant, from which the influential model emerges as a stereotype of an empty and exploitative woman.
This is just the starting point for a mercurial film, which alternates moves frequently. The second part takes place on a cruise ship on board of which very rich people are staying, as well as Carl Viaya who received the cruise as a gift. It is a typical site for social satires – similar to the resort in the “White Lotus” series – by grouping together people with a pose and those who serve them (“The Triangle of Sadness” sharpens the fact that there are classes even among the staff of servants). The third part of the film also takes place in a symbolic site that has already been used as a laboratory for examining social behaviors in previous cultural texts, including “Baal Zebov” and “Sensual Drift”.
The film moves between these sites, creating a chain of tensions and conflicts between women and men, rich and poor, capitalists and Marxists, white Europeans and members of other nations and races, exploiters and exploited. Along the way, he dismantled the identification groups and overturned the power relations again and again. Among the characters that participate in this dance of devils is a Russian oligarch who is proud of the fact that he made his fortune from shit (Zalato Burik) and came to sail with his wife and his mistress, the drunken captain (Woody Harrelson), a disabled German who had a stroke and is only able to utter one sentence (Iris Braban) , a Filipino cleaning worker (Dolly de Leon), a pair of lovable gun manufacturers from Britain (Oliver Ford Davis and Amanda Walker), and a dedicated team leader (Denmark Vicky Berlin). All the actors are excellent, and they seem to have had a lot of fun portraying the constant tension between the pose and its unraveling.
Beautiful people get pissed off on vacations. “The Triangle of Sadness”
The strength of the film, as well as its weakness, comes from what seems to be a free flow between surprising dramatic moves – we often cannot predict where the film is going. It has a lot of sharp moments, and also scenes that look too much like sketches from “Saturday Night Live”. Thus, for example, an ideological debate (allegedly) between the oligarch and the drunken captain, which is based entirely on quotes from Karl Marx, Mark Twain and other personalities, leads nowhere. This hilarious showdown is part of a wild sequence where a fancy dinner party turns into a vomit show due to a storm at sea.
As in the scene of the art performance in the museum that goes out of control in “The Square”, here too Östlund creates a clash between cultural pretense and what bursts out, and again it seems that it could have been cut first, before the shit flooded the screen. Buñuel did it better. What lends weight to the overall attack are the few moments where some of the characters nevertheless show a degree of humanism. But Östlund doesn’t let him win and leaves us speechless.
4 stars. The Triangle of Sadness Director: Ruben Östlund. Europe 2022, 150 min.