A cynical satire to impress Hollywood Marxists
This year the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize went to Triangle of Sadness, another Palm d’Or winner that says more about the state of European political attitudes than it does about art. The film’s recent American premiere at the New York Film Festival rubber-stamps that mistake. Triangle of Sadness is another of writer-director Ruben Östlund’s cynical comedies about social decay. His two Palm d’Ors (the first was for The Square, from 2017) ranks him among a select few European artistes. Östlund’s perspective on the West’s decline is so canny — reporting on characters caught up in the latest political etiquette — that the precision of his disgust verges on the uncanny.
Triangle of Sadness’s story about competitive fashion models/social-media influencers Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) turns apocalyptic. They stop bickering and take an elite cruise with wealthy white Europeans that gets shipwrecked — having turned into an orgy of vomiting before that and a literal flow of excrement. This deliberate resemblance to the blood-gushing elevator in The Shining is an art-movie stunt. It’s also Östlund’s overstated Kubrickian misanthropy — an effete response to everything that has gone wrong in the world lately.
Östlund circumvents the current politicized documentary genre to satirize ruling-class manners and morals. The hedonism and selfishness on view are an odd post-Covid subject. Triangle of Sadness takes place in a world without lockdowns and so seems to be commenting on the old free and open Europe. Yet Östlund falls back on the Marxist class critique that is the European Left’s favorite solution to everything — and the favorite delusion of the film-festival circuit.
It takes Östlund an indefensibly long time to play out this delusion. Triangle of Sadness is divided into three sections, building to the no-surprise revelation that the white West is greedy, racist, sexist, and ideologically decadent. American actor Woody Harrelson is cast as the captain of the $250 million luxury yacht, swapping political slogans with a fertilizer magnate who boasts to sycophantic Carl and Yaya that he is “the King of Shit.” These macho braggarts mock anti-communist bromides from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, topping them with recitations from Marx and Lenin. “The last capitalist we hang is the one who sold us the rope.” But Harrelson beats that, reciting the assassinations of Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK: “In each case, my government had its finger on the trigger. Installing puppet dictators. War itself became an industry.” Somehow, he misses the Wuhan origins of Covid and the lockdowns and Biden as puppet. Östlund’s instincts are off. The argument from the yacht’s bosun about “rich Russians versus crazy Russians” misses the recent European attitudes about Putin and Ukraine.
Harrelson’s speech evokes the cynicism that marked Downhill, the 2020 Will Ferrell–Julia Louis-Dreyfus remake of Östlund’s Force Majeure. Triangle of Sadness seems similarly made to impress Hollywood Marxists. But there’s no excuse for the Cannes jury’s ignoring that Östlund extends his Euro-Marxism into a second-rate allegory about third-world exploitation: An insulting subplot features the ship’s Latino toilet manager (Dolly De Leon) turning the tables on the rich, feckless whites, yet emulating their decadence (Parasite, Part II). Östlund bungles the political, spiritual, and moral lessons of such classics about chaos as Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, Antonioni’s L’Avventura, and Godard’s Weekend.
Östlund begins Triangle of Sadness satirizing the fatuous world of fashion. Male model Carl is introduced among a bevy of thin, shirtless young men vying for a runway show. A TV reporter belittles their masculinity, ridiculing the very term “male model” (while pointing out that they earn less than females). They’re reduced to objects whose “smiley or grumpy brand” casts aspersions on consumers in a vicious capitalist cycle; only the TV hack, who pronounces his expertise as an Aryan Übermensch, knows better. Next, they’re subjected to a panel of fashion experts who inspect the models for facial skill: “Can you relax that triangle of sadness between your eyebrows?” The ability to deceive can be used, respectively, for either Balenciaga or H&M markets. And on the catwalk, Carl struts to loud dance music as a slideshow proclaims “EVERYONE’S EQUAL,” “ACT NOW,” and “CYNICISM MASQUERADING AS OPTIMISM.”
The latter brazen koan restates Östlund’s Kubrickian operating principle. He pinpoints Millennial delusion and condemns liberals for their disingenuous standards. For Östlund, a model’s face is a metaphor — the field of deception that defines contemporary behavior, the delusional disorder of our time. Östlund is not Kubrick, he’s just a misanthrope and a fraud.
