![]() ![]() ![]() Earlier on the yacht, there are a few moments of particularly eye-rolling social media critique, where vapid, beautiful women in bikinis strike poses for their boyfriends who hold their phone cameras, immediately grabbing them back to go over and pick the photo most fit for posting. But less obvious commentary is not Triangle of Sadness’ strong suit. While still not the most incisive attempt at social commentary, it is gratifying to witness a ship full of tightly-wound, primped and preened, bourgeois Europeans suddenly be forced to roll around in their own filth, class distinction done away with when everyone is soaked in the same bodily fluids. Tensions between Yaya and Carl, the crew and the captain, and the crew and the passengers (with strange requests) quietly churn…until that churning becomes a roil on the night of the captain’s dinner, when everyone finally “lets loose,” so to speak, giving way to the film’s best-and most revolting-portion. Woody Harrelson makes a delightful surprise appearance as the ship’s drunken, absent captain, who would rather schedule the captain’s dinner on a stormy, nausea-inducing night, and eat a hamburger in spite of opulent dinner fare due to his aversion to fine dining. But the couple is decidedly lower in rank compared to the majority of those aboard the boat, which mostly consists of money so old that it’s begun to curdle. We then follow the young lovers into the film’s next chapter aboard a luxury yacht, a sojourn gifted from one of Yaya’s many brand admirers on Instagram. ![]() Between the three chapters the film is split into, this first is probably the best: A simple, funny capsule look at a dysfunctional couple that considers the intrinsic societal expectations surrounding gender and money. Their quarrel finally does end after Yaya’s admission that she is essentially just using Carl for stability and Instagram clout, and Carl promises to make her really love him, one way or another. And as the conversation continues into their hotel elevator, Carl is comically caught between the closing doors and his urgency to continue the fight until it’s truly over. Their car ride home as the row continues is delightfully claustrophobic, close-ups and a whirling camera almost diegetically increasing the tension between the characters. This is so that Carl can clearly establish himself to Yaya as a suitable provider. ![]() Yaya makes a lot more money than Carl in the same industry (though, “it’s unsexy to talk about money,” Yaya remarks), but insists that Carl still be the one to pay for all their dinners. The film kicks off with a sequence focusing on Carl and his model girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean), as a yet-unpaid check at the dinner table dovetails into a heated, hours-long argument over gender roles and income. In reality, Triangle of Sadness is neither as smart nor as interesting as it clearly thinks it is. It’s a smug series of uninspired sketches that poke fun at the wealthy in a way that does little to provoke deeper considerations for those most likely to watch it, other than “Yes, I agree with this.” But it’s that kind of “patting one’s back” type satire that allows those in equally powerful positions as the very people being made fun of in the film to hold it up as a paradigm of timely provocation-one only a few rungs higher than last year’ abysmal yet self-satisfied Don’t Look Up. It’s curious to consider that this is the film that won Cannes’ Palme d’Or a year after Titane, but it does make sense. What begins, seemingly, as a simple critique of the vacuous fashion industry, those who inhabit it and the subtle class differences between them, cascades into an episodic farce in which people ranging from the kind-of-rich like Carl to the super-rich are thrown into an increasingly perilous situation that strips them of their comfortable class privileges. When his character, fledgling model Carl, appears at an audition, he receives the critique to “relax the triangle of sadness between his eyes.” As the film goes on, however, this little triangle only becomes more dismayed, to the point where the recruiters at Carl’s audition would probably tell him outright he gets Botox rather than simply murmuring the thought to one another where Carl can’t hear them. The title of Ruben Östlund’s film refers to the space between Harris Dickinson’s eyebrows. ![]()
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