If you're looking for "I Spys," dating or LTRs, this is your scene.
View ProfilesPublished March 1, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
With the 95th Academy Awards coming up on March 12, I decided to check out a Best Picture nominee I hadn't seen. Triangle of Sadness, the latest dark satire from Swedish director Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure, The Square) and his first English-language feature, won the Palme d'Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Set in the world of the obscenely wealthy, it features a memorable supporting turn by Woody Harrelson and breakout performances from Filipino actor Dolly de Leon and South African model-actor Charlbi Dean — the latter of whom, in a sad turn of events, died shortly before the film's release. Triangle of Sadness can be streamed for a rental fee on various platforms.
Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Dean) are model-influencers in a one-sided romantic relationship; she freely admits she dates him for the cameras, while he wants something deeper.
The pair receive comped tickets for a luxury yacht cruise, where they find themselves surrounded by arrogant Russian oligarchs, doddery British weapons moguls and socially awkward tech bros. While the guests bask in the sun, the crew leaps to meet their every petty demand, led by Paula (Vicki Berlin), who believes in upholding a standard of flawless service. Her nemesis is the yacht's captain (Harrelson), who spends the cruise boozing in his cabin and has to be coaxed out to preside over the tradition of the "captain's table."
That formal meal coincides with a storm, and soon the guests are vomiting up their haute cuisine. One hellish night later, some of the passengers are dead and others are literally on the rocks. The social structure of the yacht flips upside down, and Carl and Yaya's relationship undergoes its own sea change.
As the real-life gap between the poor and the rich keeps widening, movies appear to have rediscovered class consciousness. While the Oscar-winning Parasite may have started the trend, Östlund was well positioned to take advantage of it. His first two festival hits were razor-sharp, meticulously observed satires of the foibles of the rich and cultured. With Triangle of Sadness, the filmmaker goes bigger and broader, into the realm of the allegorical and surreal — and it mostly works. You may or may not find the film's plot plausible as it evolves from low-key reportage on the lives of model-influencers into something more akin to a Marxist disaster movie, but the transformation is fascinating.
Shipwrecks have served as metaphors for social upheaval at least since Shakespeare's The Tempest. In his popular 1902 play The Admirable Crichton, which went on to inspire multiple movies, J.M. Barrie envisioned a scenario in which the servant and master switch places when both are stranded on a desert island. Only the servant has survival skills, so he becomes the boss by default.
Like Barrie's play, Triangle of Sadness starts from the premise that the most privileged people are the ones most eager to convince themselves that class distinctions can simply be tossed aside. Early on, we attend a high-end fashion show with the theme of "radical equality." Later, bored guests on the yacht urge the staff to goof off and have fun, not seeming to grasp that they're adding to the workers' burden by asking them to masquerade as people who aren't just there for a paycheck.
A similar dynamic plays itself out with the influencers. While Carl wants them to be equal and share expenses, Yaya sees their relationship (and probably all relationships) as transactional. Eventually, they, too, will flip positions, and he will come to understand her point of view all too well.
Rather than giving us a broad satire out of the gate, Östlund keeps things subtle. He builds very slowly to the pure delirium of the captain's table sequence, in which the captain and the oligarch drink each other under the table while theatrically debating capitalism and communism as the vessel pitches. Unsurprisingly, no one wins this sloshy ideological argument.
The downside of Östlund's slow burn is that some viewers may feel tempted to check out during the early scenes of two vapid influencers arguing about nothing. The upside is that, for those who stick it out, Triangle of Sadness keeps gaining momentum. While the characters aren't likable or deep, their shallowness feels real and human. The early conversations that seemed so trivial turn out to foreshadow significant shifts to come.
Triangle of Sadness disobeys the prime directive of Hollywood movies: It has no protagonist for the audience to identify with. (By contrast, The Menu is a movie about awful rich people that is careful to make its heroine an underdog.) Nearly everyone in Östlund's world is both exploited and exploiting; no one is innocent. Yet there's something bracingly right, even crowd-pleasing, about the plot's final twist. It may not be uplifting Oscar material, but this satire is seaworthy.
The Menu (2022; HBO Max, rentable): In Mark Mylod's dark comedy, rich tastemakers get more than they bargained for when they pay top dollar for an avant-garde meal cooked by a mercurial chef (Ralph Fiennes).
Glass Onion (2022; Netflix): A high-end vacation getaway becomes a battle of haves and have-nots in Rian Johnson's second retro mystery in the Knives Out series.
The Square (2017; Kanopy, Magnolia Selects, rentable): Östlund won his first Palme d'Or for this satire of the modern art world, in which a museum curator will do anything to make a new exhibition go viral.
Tags: Movie+TV Reviews, Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund, Woody Harrelson, Dolly de Leon, Charlbi Dean, Harris Dickinson, Staff Picks
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