This outrageous comedy prompted walkouts, a mark of a Cannes classic
Triangle of Sadness
Cannes Film Festival
Swedish provocateur Ruben Ostlund is a master of a very Scandinavian strain of distraught comedy, in which self-absorbed characters are tortured by an impish cosmos, and permission to laugh is never explicitly granted.
His magnificently outrageous Triangle of Sadness, which premiered at Cannes last night, has slipped a whoopee cushion underneath this year’s dreary and staid competition strand. It is the best film of the festival so far.
Its title refers to the area on the forehead from which worry lines emerge – and the ones belonging to Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) are about to receive a rigorous workout. Two fashion models trying to launch themselves as a glamorous influencer couple, they accept a free cabin on a luxury yacht cruise in exchange for a steady stream of preening social media posts. Carl, whose profile is already waning, usually finds himself behind the camera, snapping his sort-ofgirlfriend basking on the sundeck or in the formal dining area, dangling perfect spaghetti over her mouth. (Eat the stuff? Of course not: she doesn’t do gluten.)
Among this vapid pair’s fellow passengers are a Russian oligarch (Zlatko Buric) who made his fortune in manure, a Swedish tech billionaire (Henrik Dorsin), and a retired English couple who made their fortune in land mines and hand grenades, along with various mistresses and trophy wives. When one of these nightmares (Sunnyi Melles) demands the entire crew down tools and take a swimming break, it’s a power play disguised as a kindly gesture. But it’s also a very bad idea when raw seafood is on the menu, and the ingredients for the evening’s formal dinner end up sitting in the tropical heat for at least half an hour longer than they should. Worse still, a typhoon is blowing in, they’re entering pirate-infested waters, and the captain (Woody Harrelson) is a self-loathing Marxist who gets drunk and reads Noam Chomsky over the intercom. In short, it’s going to be a meal its survivors will not soon forget.
Ostlund conducts the central dinner scene as a symphony of panic, rancour and projectile vomit and diarrhoea: it’s art-house gross-out at its most stomach-clutchingly puerile, and I’m not ashamed to say I roared with laughter throughout. It also prompted some walkouts, which are of course the hallmark of every great Cannes film: even at the press preview, I heard a handful of abandoned seats click upright – whether this was due to its ample length or suggested disapproval at the more “explosive” moments, I wasn’t clear.
This isn’t quite satire: Ostlund (whose 2017 skewering of the art world, The Square, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes) isn’t interested in subverting the social order on this fraught little vessel so much as inverting it, and the meal becomes the pivot point in a carnivalesque upending of the rules. Soon we’re in borderline Lord of the Flies territory, where Filipina toilet attendant Abigail (Dolly De Leon) discovers her survival skills are of rather more use to the group than, say, Carl’s – though she’ll find a use for this hunky young thing, don’t you worry about that.
The points of Ostlund’s Triangle are far from subtle. Vanity is toxic; fortunes corrupt; everyone loves to see an Instagrammer getting their comeuppance. But across its wellearned two-and-a-half-hour running time, epic schadenfreude keeps edging into genuine sympathy, and we feel just sorry enough for these awful people for the next humiliation to sting just as hard. The 25-year-old Londonborn Dickinson doesn’t give Carl depth so much as suggest he’d desperately like some – the kind of performance detail which elevates the characters here from stereotypes into agonisingly plausible individuals.
Even so, Ostlund knows sometimes a well-turned gag is all that’s required. Who could resist a film in which a sweet old lady watches a live grenade roll down the deck and come to a rest against her foot, then turns to her husband and says: “Look, dear, it’s one of ours”?
Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced.