Triangle of Sadness debuted at Cannes last May and won the Palme d’Or for best film. The chances of it repeating the feat at the Oscars 10 months later seems about as likely as Jeremy Clarkson duetting with Beyoncé. The Academy doesn’t seem to go for films that have 15-minute set pieces in which almost the entire cast projectile vomits, topped off with backed-up toilets exploding in a surge of sewage.
Well, more fool them – because Triangle of Sadness is a film for our times. It follows Carl (Harris Dickinson), a model, and his influencer girlfriend Yaya (played by Charlbi Dean, who tragically died aged 32, just before the film was released), as they take a free luxury cruise, Instagramming as they go. The other holidaymakers are particularly grotesque examples of the super-rich. There’s a sweet, elderly English couple who turn out to be arms dealers; Dimitry, a Russian oligarch who has earned his billions selling fertiliser – or, as he more bluntly puts it, shit (this is quite an excrement-focused film), and a woman who insists that the entire staff of the ship take a swim. Since they have been told that any request from the passengers, however ludicrous, cannot be refused, they comply – which leads to the food for that evening spoiling, and the volcanic puke-fest. Meanwhile, the captain spends most of his time in his cabin getting pissed, until he emerges in order to swap Chomsky and Marx quotes with Dimitry over the ship’s PA system while it is battered by a terrible storm.
Many critics have felt that the satire in Triangle of Sadness is crass and heavy-handed, but as we know from any news website, the super-rich are crass – who could forget the story of Jim Ratcliffe and his charity ski lodge? I’m also not sure that the satire is its main point in any case: as with his previous films The Square and Force Majeure, Swedish writer/director Ruben Östlund is more concerned with putting his characters into excruciatingly awkward situations, and then leaving them to stew for ages, in order to see what the terrible decisions they invariably make under duress say about human nature. Near the start of the film, Carl and Yaya have a lengthy argument after he finds himself repeatedly picking up the bill for dinner, despite the fact that she earns more than him. Male models are less marketable than female ones, and in any case his looks are beginning to go. A mean casting agent for a fashion ad has asked him to relax the “triangle of sadness” that gives the film its title – the frown marks between his eyebrows.
The film’s subject, more than the terrible behaviour of the super-rich (though there’s certainly plenty of that) is really the arbitrary way money and power are distributed, and what people do to keep hold of it. The film’s final section sees eight of the passengers shipwrecked on an island, where the yacht’s older Filipino cleaner, Abigail, becomes top dog, as she is the only person who can catch fish and build a fire. She helps herself to the only shelter, and also to the sexual services of Carl. In 2018, in an interview for Apartamento magazine before he made Triangle of Sadness (and in which he cheerfully spoilered literally the entire plot), Östlund said that he wanted to show Abigail and Carl “having sex and making out, really looking at these images that we are not very used to seeing but have seen in the opposite set-up”. In the event, their sex scene is pretty tame – particularly when compared to moments like Dimitry alternately crying over his wife’s corpse and pulling the jewellery off.
As we battle through the cost-of-living crisis, it’s no surprise that films and TV shows have started examining the subject of class hatred – last year saw Nanny and The Menu in cinemas, and the second series of The White Lotus on TV. Prescient and more thoughtful than it initially appears, Triangle of Sadness gleefully shows that the decadence of the super-rich has gorged itself to the point of extinction. But it also asks questions about what’s coming next – a matriarchy? Socialism? Or just more of the same old shit?
