Ruben Ostlund’s latest provocation, this year’s Palme d’Or winner, is absurdist satire done right. The writer-director yet again proves he’s a unique voice in cinema and one that is much-needed at the moment.
However, I can’t help but think that the Swedish auteur just isn’t able to stick the landing in his films. It happened before, in the mostly brilliant “Force Majeure” and “The Square” and it happens again here. 3/4 of this latest film is absolutely brilliant.
In “Triangle of Sadness,” Ostlund again tackles gender and socio-political games. Briefly, it’s about a group of a dozen or so millionaires who decide to spend their vacation on a cruise yacht. The smiles are fake, and the privilege through the roof.
This is a very dark comedy, although very much a mosaic of narratives, it loosely centers on a fashion model celebrity couple who are invited on the luxury cruise for the super-rich. The yacht’s captain is a rabid Marxist (Woody Harrelson) who starts getting along with one of the guests, an anti-Marxist (scene-stealer Zlatko Burić), just as the ship hits an emergency.
I don’t want to get too much into the plot because the less you know about “Triangle of Sadness” the better. Just know that the laughs stick in your throat, it’s a bitingly hilarious movie, and one steeped in absolute social modernity. Characters come and go, and the overall feeling is that Ostlund’s distaste for today’s cultural climate is anger-filled. There’s also a nifty performance here from Dolly De Leon as Abigail, a toilet manager on the ship and the power dynamics she sees shifting as, quite literally, shit hits the fan.
Clocking in at 142 minutes, the film is overlong and episodic, but there’s a real richness to the satire, so much so that this will bug the hell out of the politically correct, and the elites, who claim to be for the people. They will feel uncomfortable watching this film, and deservedly so. It exposes their hypocrisy.
Ostlund is trying to tell us that, If push comes to shove, and survival comes calling, these people can’t help but blatantly unmask their artificial nature and, above all, the privileged selfishness. It’s the best comedy of the year. [A-/B+]
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.