Old Yorker

Ruben Östlund (2022)

Since the Cannes Palme d’Or was first awarded in 1955, only eight directors have won it twice and only three for films they made consecutively – Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror (1987), The Best Intentions (1992)), Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon (2009), Amour (2012)) and Ruben Östlund, whose Triangle of Sadness landed the festival’s top prize this May, five years after The Square.  Östlund’s Cannes triumphs not only put him in very select company but are probably unique because he didn’t deserve to win on either occasion.

Like The Square and Force Majeure (2014), its predecessor in the Östlund filmography, the first part of Triangle of Sadness is the best. That might seem obvious with a writer-director who has little to say but such abundant, brazen self-belief that he goes on saying it, noisily and tiresomely.  In the case of this latest film, however, the difference is more salient because the narrative is explicitly divided into three sections – ‘Carl and Yaya’, ‘The Yacht’ and ‘The Island’ – and means more, because the first of these sections is much better than anything else in Östlund’s work that I’ve seen.

The specific meaning of the film’s title, which also chimes with its tripartite structure, emerges in a prologue that introduces Carl (Harris Dickinson).  In his mid-twenties, he works as a model; we first see him, among other young men, being photographed, then interviewed, for a possible modelling job.  One of the interviewers mentions Carl’s ‘triangle of sadness’, a term used in cosmetic surgery for a wrinkle between the eyes:  it’s quickly fixable with Botox but the very mention of the wrinkle serves as a reminder that a fashion model’s days are numbered.  In production notes used as the BFI handout for screenings of his film, Östlund also points out that ‘a male model generally earns only a third of what a female model does’ and that ‘When I started to do research for the film, numerous male models told me that they often have to manoeuvre past powerful men in the industry who want to sleep with them, sometimes with the promise of a more successful career’.  That may party explain why the camp photographer snapping Carl et al at the start of the film is overplayed but this is a strong sequence, even so.  As he shoots, the photographer keeps asking the models to switch between ‘grumpy’ and ‘smiley’ faces, imagining they’re in an advert for H&M (= grin/cheap and cheerful) or Balenciaga (= unsmiling/seriously expensive).  They oblige, at amusingly high speed.

The unusual bias of the male/female pay gap in fashion modelling drives the short ‘Carl and Yaya’ section that follows.  Carl’s partner Yaya (Charlbi Dean), also a model, earns more than he does.  Dining in a high-end restaurant, they get into a row about who pays the bill:  less articulate than Yaya and more stewed up, Carl repeatedly insists the disagreement ‘isn’t about money’.  The exchange is very well written and performed.  The argument’s dynamics are gripping.  Carl and Yaya both aspire to being Instagram influencers and it follows that she’s the more successful in this department, too.  At the start of the film’s second section, the couple are passengers on a luxury cruise – all expenses paid, seemingly by one of Yaya’s brand partnerships.  This supplies an effective bridge between the two sections, keeping Carl on the back foot, making sense of his prickly, possessive reaction to a bit of harmless flirting between Yaya and a flagrantly macho crew member (Timoleon Gketsos).  But other personnel on the superyacht – staff and passengers – are the harbinger of what Östlund has in store.

Staff manager Paula (Vicki Berlin) gees up her team, ordering them to accede to the wealthy passengers’ every demand, however silly or unreasonable.  The yacht’s captain, Thomas Smith, (Woody Harrelson), an alcoholic Marxist, spends much of his time in his cabin with a bottle for company.  Russian oligarch Dimitry (Zlatko Burić) made his fortune in fertiliser (‘I sell shit’).  Elderly British gent Winston (Oliver Ford Davies) made his in arms manufacture.  Both are accompanied by their wives, respectively Vera (Sunnyi Melles) and Clementine (Amanda Walker), who shares a name with the spouse of history’s most famous Winston.  A few people on board aren’t such blunt satirical instruments:  the deputy captain Darius (Arvin Kananian); Abigail (Dolly De Leon), a cleaner (she shares her name with the traditional English term for a lady’s maid); lonely, dweebish tech millionaire Jarmo (Henrik Dorsin); Therese (Iris Berben), who can speak only a single phrase as the result of a stroke, and her husband, Uli (Ralph Schicha).  (Therese’s one phrase – in German – is ‘In den Wolken, Uli’; she can also manage ‘ja’ and ‘nein’, whereas Paula’s first rule to her fellow workers is never to say no.)  These are also relatively minor figures – at this stage anyway.  They’re eclipsed by the characters who proclaim Östlund’s lampooning intentions loud and clear, as he clears the decks for the film’s big set piece.

Thomas briefly sobers up for the captain’s dinner, during which the yacht runs into a storm.  Östlund’s bludgeoning approach in earlier films brought the phrase ad nauseam to mind but in Triangle of Sadness it has literal meaning:  in a key passage that’s already notorious, the passengers are spectacularly seasick.  This is meant to be more disgusting because the moneyed throwers-up are ejecting their conspicuous consumption – gourmet dishes and the champagne they swill – though it’s hard to think the projectile vomiting would have been easier on the eye if, like proudly plebeian Captain Thomas, everyone had stuck to burger and chips.  With fellow travellers spewing or excreting all around them and one going into cardiac arrest, Thomas and Dimitry – the American communist and the Russian capitalist – carry on drinking together.  Over the yacht’s intercom, they compete, with the help of Google searches on their phones, in spouting epigrams promoting their political creed (‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’, ‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money’ (M Thatcher), etc).  Storm damage causes the craft’s sewage system to break down and the lights to go out.  At least the latter means you no longer see the consequences of the former.  As the storm subsides and morning comes, a boatful of pirates approaches the disabled vessel.  They lob a hand grenade on board.  It lands just beside Winston and Clementine, out on deck getting a breath of fresh air.  ‘Look, darling,’ she says, ‘Do you think it’s one of ours?’  Boom.

And, in Östlund’s mind, boom-boom:  he clearly sees himself as a black-comedic genius – though the gruesome bombast of the shipboard scenes confirms him, rather, as a master wielder of the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut.  His worst defect, though, which each of his last three films has demonstrated to an increasing degree, is failing to follow things through – whether because he can’t or won’t isn’t clear, though I suspect the latter.  In ‘Carl and Yaya’, Östlund’s satire of celebrity culture and the title pair’s anxious appetite for being part of it, is sharp but sympathetic.  In ‘The Yacht’, Carl and Yaya get in the way of the much cruder takedown of the ‘obscenely’ rich.  It’s implied that Carl is in two senses at sea but we don’t get much idea of Yaya’s feelings and both of them retreat to the margins of what is, also in two senses, Östlund’s puke-fest.  Carl and Yaya are back in evidence when they emerge from the yacht-wreck, two of only eight survivors.  Courtesy of a (suitably well-appointed) lifeboat, they fetch up on a desert island, along with Dimitry, Abigail, Paula, Therese, Jarmo and Nelson (Jean-Christophe Folly), a ship’s mechanic.  ‘The Island’ is where the film spends its last hour (the whole thing runs 147 minutes).  It’s also where Östlund’s showoff misanthropy and disregard of anything inconvenient to his immediate narrative needs are more shameless than ever.

Lowly Abigail is the sole member of the group with practical survival skills:  she can build a fire, catch fish, and so on.  As she starts to take charge, Triangle of Sadness looks to be heading for The Admirable Crichton territory but not for long.  Abigail claims private bed space in the lifeboat; she reprimands Carl and Nelson for helping themselves to its emergency supply of pretzels (Harris Dickinson and Jean-Christophe Folly play the pair’s inept denial of wrongdoing very nicely).  Back on the superyacht, Abigail, on her cabin-cleaning round, once interrupted Carl and Yaya in bed, and was told where to get off.  Now Abigail has Carl share her lifeboat bed each night, in exchange for special privileges and food, which makes Yaya jealous.  Although this is a nifty illustration of the upturned balance of power, Östlund devotes too much screen time to it – long after making clear that, if the meek inherit the earth, they’ll be as self-serving as their predecessors were.  Dimitry, under the new regime, instantly changes his political tune (the epigrams he quotes lurch to the left) but is only superficially a reformed character.  When his wife’s dead body washes up on the shore, Dimitry weeps as he holds Vera in his arms.  He then carefully directs his attention to removing the jewellery she’s still wearing.

None of the survivors shows much anxiety about how long they can continue to survive or interest in the possibility of rescue but why would they?  That’s not going to matter until Ruben Östlund is good and ready for it.  One day (!), Yaya decides to explore the island on a cliff walk and sets off, accompanied by Abigail.  After crossing the cliff and descending the other side, they discover an elevator and realise they’ve been living next door to a luxury resort all the time.  Having delivered this supposedly savage ironic twist, Östlund barely knows what to do with it.  Yaya is ecstatic at the prospect of normal self-promoting service being resumed, Abigail dismayed that she’ll be returned to servitude.  As Yaya, with her back to her, yatters on about making Abigail her assistant, Abigail picks up a rock and approaches from behind.  We don’t see whether she manages to do the same to Yaya as Jarmo, in a gory boost to his manly self-esteem, succeeded in doing to a donkey on the island a few screen minutes earlier.  Instead, Östlund, for his closing shots, cuts to Carl, running through The Jungle.

As in The Square, Östlund gets better performances than he deserves, especially from the two young leads.  Harris Dickinson is engaging and witty, from his light-switch changes of expression in the opening fashion shoot through to the pretzels incident and beyond.  He does a fine job of showing Carl as basically both decent and weak.  Vexed when Yaya and the crew member make eyes at each other, Carl reports the man to Paula.  Next thing, he’s seen leaving the vessel and Carl looks rather appalled that he’s made this happen.  It’s a real pity that Östlund doesn’t make use of Harris Dickinson’s charm and skill to make Carl the central consciousness of the whole story.  Charlbi Dean impresses, too, and it’s a greater, tragic pity that this film turned out to her last:  in late August this year Dean died, it seems from a lung infection, at the age of thirty-two.  Triangle of Sadness benefits from, in addition to an able cast, classy music by Mikkel Maltha and Leslie Ming.

This is Östlund’s first English-language film although it seems he’s not too happy about that.  In the production notes mentioned above, he explains that he’s ‘ambivalent about making films in English since I’m critical about the dominance of Anglo-Saxon culture.  It’s absurd what kind of influence it has over Sweden and Scandinavia’.  Let’s hope it’s a consolation to him that Triangle of Sadness has so far raked in $14.5 million at the international box office – a figure still below the production budget ($15.6m) but surely far in excess of what a film made in the director’s native Swedish might have taken.  Ruben Östlund’s professed ambivalence on this has the ring of someone keen to make clear he wrestles with his conscience, less ready to acknowledge that he tends to win such bouts, as well as Palmes d’Or.

1 November 2022