Triangle of Sadness ★★★★
SWEDISH director Ruben Ostlund’s most recent award-winning film Triangle of Sadness achieves the dual success of being intellectually challenging and highly entertaining.
It won the Palme d’Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Film at this year’s Oscars. It follows the success of The Square which also won the big award at Cannes in 2017.
Both films depict and criticise the construction of modern society and thinking that continues to divide us on economic, political, ethnic and sexual lines.
In The Square, Ostlund used the artistic world to examine his themes. In Triangle of Sadness he skilfully slides his scalpel into the world of modelling , not only laying bare its vacuous heart but also moving on to eviscerate the rich and privileged.
society that continu2022 internationally co-produced satirical black comedy written and directed by Ruben Östlund in his English-language feature film debut. The film stars Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean (in her last role), Dolly de Leon, Zlatko Burić, Henrik Dorsin, Vicki Berlin, and Woody Harrelson. The film follows a celebrity couple on a luxury cruise with wealthy guests.
The film is brilliantly divided into three distinct sections.
In part one we follow international models and partners Carl and Yaya whose relationship is likely doomed. Carl is an enigma, vague and wistful sometimes but prone to extended periods of ridiculous self-examination that lead to arguments. Yaya is also a so-called influencer who taunts Carl by claiming she is just in their relationship to find a rich husband. It’s a great opening that sets the tone beautifully.
Part two is set on a luxury superyacht on which Carl and Yaya are guests. Among the wealthy are a Russian oligarch and his wife; an elderly couple who built their fortune on weapon sales, a lonely tech millionaire and a range of others whose constant demands for attention and increasingly bizarre requests frustrate the constantly suffering crew.
The drunken captain insists on having the traditional captain’s dinner on a night when the weather is rough as hell and the resulting sequence is an hilarious allegorical depiction of a society in decline.
The third part’s details I won’t reveal.
The film is full of interesting, totally flawed characters delivery lines of Ostlund’s brilliantly biting black comedy, boosted by an uniformily excellent cast including Harris Dickinson as Carl, Charlbi Dean (who died shortrly before the filkm’s release) as Yaya, Dolly De Leon as a yacht crew member whose role becomes fundamental to a resolution of the story, Zlatko Burić as the oligarch Dimitry and Woody Harrelson as the captain.
The dinner sequence includes a terrific collection of scenes where the self-confessed Russian capitalist Dimitri and American socialist Harrelson drunkenly argue about politics and privilege across the entire yacht’s audio system while guests are struggling with the vomit-inducing weather and high seas.
This is one of my best viewing experiences to date in 2023.