Western civilization is a sinking ship and its passengers are all sick unto death -- this is the premise of Ruben Ostlund's earnest and strenuously labored The Triangle of Sadness (2022). Ostlund's movie won a big award at Cannes in 2022 and its highly regarded (as well as notorious for some nauseating scenes in its second act). But I don't think the movie is as good as its reputation.
Ostlund is well-known for his thesis-driven movies: Force Majeure (still his best I think) argues that contemporary sexual politics can't eradicate primordial instincts about gender roles -- a hip young couple find their marriage imperiled when the husband and father fails to act with expected courage in the face of an avalanche at a posh ski resort. In The Square, Swedish upper-middle class elites are forced to confront the limits of their liberalism in the face of immigration to their country and a banquet like the Nobel prize feast that is invaded by a literal cave man -- the titular "square" is a conceptual artwork that imagines what it would be like if everyone were really accorded equal rights. In The Triangle of Sadness, a shipwreck forces a Brechtian transformation of values associated with sex and class roles. All three movies feature contemporary men forced to confront their failures to meet the standards of chivalry, courage and, even, fundamental competency that traditional values (thought to have been outgrown but still ruling with a dead hand) impose on masculinity. After Force Majeure, Ostlund has become increasingly overt and ideological with the effect that his films have come to resemble rather tedious and didactic debates staged with interludes of provocation. The Triangle of Sadness represents the nadir of this development and one wishes that that Ostlund would now devote his considerable talents to making a thriller or Western or romance picture less fraught with political and social implications.
The Tirangle of Sadness refers to the place between the eyebrows where furrows gather -- if you are a male model, your "triangle of sadness" should remain smooth and unblemished. We learn this proposition in a prelude to the movie, an audition in which twenty or so pretty boys audition for a male model part. They are supposed to look alternately fierce, depressed and bitter, and happy. The sequence is funny and it introduces the male protagonist, a very cute, if dim-witted young man named Carl. (Carl looks like an even more stupid and befuddled Ryan Gosling, an actor who, to my eyes, always looks very dimwitted.) The film proper divides into three acts. In the first, "Carl and Yaya", we see Carl fighting with Yaya, a model and internet "influencer", over the bill placed before them at an expensive restaurant, probably in Stockholm. (The place is so upscale that there are no prices on the menu.) Yaya, who repeatedly says that she makes more money than Carl, wants him to pick up the bill -- because they're on a date and that's what men are supposed to do. He disputes this with her and they end up in a savage quarrel; Yaya is pretty smart and she clearly has the upper-hand on poor Carl, who knows he wants something quite desperately but doesn't know exactly what it is. Act Two is called "The Yacht". Yaya and Carl are on a super-expensive cruise with various forms of Eurotrash. (They're interlopers because they are traveling for free in consideration of Yaya posting pictures to promote the cruise lines on her Instagram account.) The other passengers are nasty specimens of late Capitalism: a munitions manufacturer, a Russian oligarch who seems to have two wives, a plump and bald tech wizard who has been stood-up by his girlfriend and wants to post pictures to make her jealous, a German woman who is paralyzed and can only speak three words, "In den Wolken" (that is, "in the clouds"), and several other travelers, one of whom is obviously demented -- she keeps asking that the sails be cleansed but the ship has no sails and it "motorized" as stated by its Captain played in a performance that is more or less phoned-in by Woody Harrelson of all people. The crew is equally repugnant, a group of eager-beaver stewards and stewardesses, more than willing to abase themselves for tips from the super-wealthy patrons on board. They are led by a Nordic goddess with short blonde hair who struts around barking orders like a Nazi concentration camp boss. Harrelson seems not to have been available for much of the shooting because he doesn't appear except for a fifteen minutes sequence at the middle of the film -- he's not in the movie's last half and doesn't appear on screen throughout most of the "The Yacht"; we hear him, obviously intoxicated, in his Stateroom, refusing to come out of his locked room. The vicious rich people bicker and bully the crew and, at one point, make them all strip to their bathing suits and zoom down a water-slide into the sea. The Russian oligarch threatens to buy the yacht if his infantile demands aren't met -- a helicopter has come out to the ship with a case of Nutella for him since the yacht wasn't equipped with that stuff when it set sail. Carl complains to the Nazi boss-lady about a Greek sailor who has taken off his shirt on deck and impressed Yaya with his physique. To Carl's surprise, the sailor is immediately fired and, in fact, taken by speedboat to the shore. At the base of this social pyramid, there are a dozen or so southeast Asian women who scrub the floors and maintain the toilets.
The film's most notorious sequence is the Captain's Dinner, a meal that takes place during heavy seas and results in explosive, projectile vomiting on the part of most of the guests. This sequence is repellent but funny and, of course, is a reprise of the Mr. Creosote episode in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. As the perky crew serve bizarre haute cuisine to the guests, people start puking uncontrollably. The ship is rolling and, at first, this is ascribed to seasickness, with the crew members strangely encouraging people to eat more and not less. The dishes are cubist collages of atomized sea-weed and fragments of fish in hideous-looking sauces. The floors get slick with vomit and the storm increases so that the ship rolls wildly back and forth and the guests ending up skidding around in the puke. Then, the diarrhea begins and we are treated to scenes of guests shitting out their guts in toilets that tip back and forth spilling the excrement and the hapless travelers on the slick tile floors. The oligarch and the sea-captain are engaged in a drinking game and end up reciting aphorisms about capitalism and socialism over the loud-speaker By this point, the metaphors have taken over and the film has become a parable about the plight of western civilization. Two warring ideologies (communism and capitalism) are on display while the plumbing in the ship (the environment?) bursts and the staterooms and hallways are awash in a sea of shit. The drunk captain tells the guests by PA system that the yacht is sinking and so they put on life vests and still spewing excrement from both ends stagger around on the vessel so that they are forcefully flung against walls and down steps where the people lay in depressed and motionless heaps. The scene goes on and on, replete with disgusting special effects and, at last, it's dawn. Mercifully, perhaps, some African pirates attack the ship; the British munitions maker and his wife pick up a hand-grenade and are blown to bits and the ship sinks.
The third part of the movie is called "The Island". Seven survivors have made it ashore to a rocky desert island. None of them have any idea what do do. The men are so feckless that it never occurs to them to explore the place to discover its resources -- in fact, the island has a big luxury resort a few miles away but this isn't discovered until the last five minutes of the rather long (two-and-a-half hours) film. A lifeboat, a sort of sealed orange capsule, washes up. In this capsule, there is an industrious and omni-competent Southeast Asian maid -- the manager of "toilet maintenance" on the yacht. She knows how to fish and start fires and quickly becomes the de facto leader of the castaways. Of course, systems of oppression always replicate themselves after revolutions or shipwrecks and the enterprising maid exploits the other castaways, ultimately forcing Carl into sexual submission -- while having sex with her, he says "I love you. You feed me fish." The castaways have no water except bottled Evian beverages but they have plenty of aerosol spray cans that were advertised as soothing lotion but are really just water. The Russian oligarch finds one his wives dead on the beach and weeps over her while carefully removing her jewels and diamond necklace. Later, he becomes good friends, as one might expect, with a pirate who has also washed up on the island. Carl seems to fall in love with the Asian maid who now rules the castaways. Yaya is jealous but she seems quite resourceful herself and decides to hike across the island to see what is on the other side of the mountains. The toilet maintenance director goes with her and, together, they discover that there is a big resort just over the hill. (We suspect this when an African mysteriously appears to the mute German woman and offers to sell her knock-offs of luxury Louis Vuitton and other bags -- it's a parody of Friday's appearance to Crusoe in Defoe's book.) The castaways are reverting to paleolithic customs -- they murder a poor donkey, a beast whose braying has caused them to think that the island is inhabited by monsters; then, they paint their exploits on the wall of a cave.
In broad form, the film follows the pattern of Lina Wertmueller's Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea in August, a 1974 film in which a man and woman become castaways on a desert island after an expensive yacht sinks. (The film was infamous for its sexual politics, repudiating feminism it was thought -- Giancarlo Giannini played the Communist, brawny sailor who rapes the upper-class dame acted by Mariangela Melato.) Wertmueller's movie, like Ostlund's film,implies that sexual desire operates according to apolitical, even anti-social paradigms that contradict our liberal assumptions about human nature. Wertmueller's film was, in turn, a reprise of the 1957 Paradise Lagoon which remakes Cecil B. DeMille's silent film, Male and Female (1919) with Gloria Swanson playing the wealthy and pampered "rich bitch" shipwrecked on a desert island with a lecherous and enterprising butler. And, of course, the immediate source for all of these films is J. M. Barrie's 1902 play, The Admirable Crichton, in which a butler assumes command over rich people and peers of the realm after a shipwreck maroons the castaways on another desert island. Obviously, this plot is resonant on many levels and has attracted many versions of the story -- The Triangle of Sadness reworks Swept Away, which was remade unsuccessfully by Madonna in 2002 (with Adrianna Giangelo, the son of the star of the 1974 picture) applying a feminist interpretation to what was an originally a scandalous anti-feminist film -- in Triangle of Sadness, the lower class person, whose survival skills allow him or her to dominate the other castaways is an immigrant or guest worker woman from Thailand or Burma; she makes the pulchritudinous Carl into her "boy toy." Unfortunately, Ostlund is becoming lazy -- the debate between Capitalism and Socialism prosecuted by the oligarch (who argues for Capitalism) and the Ship Captain (a proponent of Socialism) is conducted entirely in aphorisms extracted from speeches by Ronald Reagan, Lenin, and Noam Chomsky. It's as Ostlund couldn't be bothered to write his own dialogue to make these points. The movie is too long and too earnest -- it's fundamentally humorless. (The film illustrates another feature that I've seen increasingly in European movies -- there are, at least, 30 producers who contributed to the movie including the Swedish Film Institute, BFI, and many, many Danish and German and French TV channels and streaming services. It would be impossible to describe this film as Swedish or British or, even, really foreign since there is undoubtedly Hollywood money in the picture as well. The movie's dialogue is English.)
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