This year’s Cannes brought another member into the double-Palme club, the directors who have won it twice, to go with Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers – among others. Ruben Östlund, who won the big prize in 2017 for his art world black-comedy The Square, now picks up the Palme again for another geometrically entitled movie: Triangle of Sadness, a glossy, sexually charged satire on fashion, globalisation, narcissist culture and the super-rich.
Well, maybe this is film that the world needs now: discomfort-food cinema, feelbad cinema, but also cinema that doesn’t upset us too much and flatters our sense of who the bad guys are. We need a movie about a bunch of obnoxious rich idiots on a boat heading for nowhere and who deserve to die, a film that expresses our cynical and exhausted dismissal of the world, but also something that doesn’t challenge our own sensibilities too much. That’s the mood we’re all in and maybe Triangle of Sadness addresses that mood. Triangle of Sadness could well be speaking to the zeitgeist, but not as interestingly (or as originally) as it thinks.
British actor Harris Dickinson plays a fashion model who fears his career is washed up and on the rocks (one cruel art director tells him his “triangle of sadness”, the zone on his forehead above his eyebrows, is not quite all that it could be). Perhaps to cheer him up, his vapid and selfish fashion model girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean) takes him on a luxury cruise that she has got for nothing thanks to her massive Instagram-influencer following. But this ship of fools, populated by plutocrats and the Undeserving Rich, and piloted by a captain (Woody Harrelson), who is on the verge of a breakdown, is heading for disaster and the one person who might be able to help is the ship’s toilet cleaner, ably played by Dolly De Leon, one of the vessel’s invisible servant class.
Triangle of Sadness was – like everything else this year – divisive. The opening section is interesting, but otherwise it is derivative (ideas taken from Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe and JM Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton) and heavy-handed. Others loved its undoubted boldness and showmanship, and it certainly had ambition. This movie was undoubtedly a talking point. But there were no ideas in it that had not already been aired more subtly, more rewardingly, and yet also more powerfully in his previous film, The Square, and it seemed very shallow to me. Perhaps its internationalist/stateless casting and milieu helped it to find unanimity on the jury.
The Grand Prix went (jointly) to the movie that everyone here adored: Lukas Dhont’s intense and fervent drama about the relationship between two 13-year-old boys, which was indeed wonderfully acted and very affecting. Whatever my (infinitesimal) reservations about Close, I personally would have thought it far superior to the grandstanding showoff film-making of Triangle of Sadness. But here again, the #Cannes2022 curse of division and dismay raised its head. The prize was awarded jointly (one of two such) and it had to share the platform with Claire Denis’s interesting but flawed and rather minor film Stars at Noon, which had been roundly mocked by many critics. I found it an interesting attempt to fuse the personal and the political with its erotic encounter between an American sex worker and a mysterious British businessman – but the acting was not out of the top drawer.
The jury prize went jointly to one of my very favourite films at Cannes: The Eight Mountains, by Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch, about two straight men who build a shack together to have the idyllic summers of which they were deprived as children, is utterly superb. The Eight Mountains shared the award with EO, a film about a donkey (and inspired indirectly by Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar) which was created by two legends. It was directed by the Polish master Jerzy Skolimowski who first came to Cannes in 1972 with a film starring David Niven and Gina Lollobrigida, and produced by Jeremy Thomas, the British titan of independent producing. EO was a film that grew in my mind after I had seen it, and it was much loved by many in Cannes.
My personal pick for the Palme d’Or had been Park Chan-wook’s glorious noir romance thriller Decision to Leave, which was exquisitely acted – especially by its electrifying female lead, Tang Wei – and superbly made at every level. There is obvious justice in its getting the best director prize, though I had hoped for more. As for the acting, the great Korean player Song Kang-ho (much loved here in Cannes for his tremendous leading turn in the Palme-winning Parasite) won the best actor prize as the emotionally conflicted hustler who sells unwanted babies to childless couples in the serio-comedy Broker from Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda. It was a good performance, although the film itself is hardly Kore-eda’s best. The Iranian actor Zar Emir-Ebrahimi won best actress as the (fictional) investigative journalist who cracks the (real) case of a serial killer in Holy Spider – again, a good performance, though not in the league of Tang Wei in Decision to Leave.
I was very pleased to see best screenplay go to Tarik Saleh for Boy from Heaven, his anti-clerical satire which was also an espionage drama with more than a hint of John le Carré – a very chancy attack on the theocracy of Egypt. But giving the Prix Speciale to the Dardenne brothers for their interesting but pretty moderate social-realist drama Tori et Lokita felt like ancestor worship.
So that was Cannes this year: some excellent movies by Park Chan-wook, Lukas Dhont, Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch being rewarded – and the great big flashy and conceited flattire/satire Triangle of Sadness. But this year was a showcase for great work – a future treat for cinema audiences.
