Triangle of Sadness.

Triangle of Sadness was a surprise nominee for Best Picture this year, also taking home nods for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. It’s the first film for writer/director Ruben Östlund since 2017’s The Square, and like that film, it’s a disjointed story that starts out with great ambitions and ends up succeeding most when it focuses on its simpler themes. (You can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

The triangle of the title refers to the film’s tripartite structure, which I would summarize as “fine, bad, good,” in that order. We start out by following two models, Yaya (Charlbi Dean, who died just before the film premiered) and Carl (Harris Dickinson), who are in a relationship but fight over seemingly trivial matters like who’s paying for the check in a restaurant – she makes far more money than he does, but gender roles dictate that he should pay. She’s also a social media influencer, which leads to an invitation for the two of them to go on a cruise on a luxury yacht, where they meet a bunch of fairly horrible rich people and mostly ignore the obsequious crew, who are themselves divided into the mostly white upstairs staff and the mostly nonwhite cleaning and cooking staff. The ship sinks, and a group of survivors wash up on an island where they have to find a way to survive, but it turns out only Abigail (Dolly De Leon), who barely appeared in the film’s first two parts, has any skills pertinent to staying alive.

The 2022 film and TV cycle was full of “rich people are terrible” themes, from White Lotus to Tár to The Menu, and Triangle of Sadness offers nothing new in this vein, which ultimately is the movie’s undoing. Yaya is vapid and a shallow stereotype of the Instagram model/influencer, right down to having Carl photograph her about to take a bite of a pasta dish that she won’t eat because she’s “gluten intolerant.” The rich people they meet on the boat barely need names, as they don’t even rise to the level of caricatures, with just one of them (Winston) serving some real function beyond being wealthy and horrible, and in that case it’s for a pretty good joke that has a strong payoff later in the segment. It’s only when we get to part three, on the island, that any characters get real development and show some depth, including Abigail, and the script finally makes good use of its ire towards the idle rich. It takes way too long to get to that point, however, and Östlund could have just made the whole movie out of that and given us a better end product.

That middle section, though, is a mess, figuratively and literally – I asked a friend if he’d seen the movie, and he hadn’t, but he asked if I meant the film where everyone throws up on a boat. There’s about ten minutes of people suffering from food poisoning, projectile vomiting around the dining room and in the halls, which is later followed by the ship’s waste disposal system backing up, just in case you weren’t already sufficiently grossed out. It’s a two-minute gag that goes on forever, exacerbated by a dreadful bit where the drunk captain (Woody Harrelson, mostly wasted here) engages in a superficial debate between capitalism and communism with a wealthy Russian oligarch who made his money in fertilizer (or, as he says, “shit”) over the ship’s PA system. It’s unfunny, and consists more of the two men, both thoroughly inebriated, spouting aphorisms from other writers, reminiscent of college students arguing over these subjects because they took one class on Marx and are now experts in the field.

The third section redeems the film to some extent, and ends with multiple points of ambiguity that work extremely well, although it just shows how much better Triangle of Sadness could have been. The Square was also full of interesting ideas, perhaps more so, but also ended with enough ambiguity to soften some of the too on-the-nose aspects of the satire within, right down to the question of whether we should feel any sympathy for the hapless yet arrogant and entitled main character. Here, Östlund’s targets are too easy, and because they’re all stranded on this island – how this is possible, or they could be stuck there for what seems like weeks, when most of these same people were still using their cell phones right when the ship sank – we have some sympathy for all of the characters, since we’re never hoping for any of them to die, or even really to suffer any further. (Not that any of that would be a good thing, either.) There’s a clear intent here to tell us that rich people are useless to society, and while I’m not exactly disagreeing with the point, the final third drifts away from it enough to undermine the first two sections, especially since it’s by far the funniest and best crafted of the film’s parts.

How this film ended up with a Best Picture nomination with a ten-minute scene of emesis and diarrhea is beyond me; I wonder if voters thought this made the film avant-garde. It’s not half as clever as it thinks it is, unfortunately, and other than De Leon, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her performance, none of the actors has much to work with. Aftersun and Decision to Leave come to mind as two films that the Academy’s voters were at least aware of, having given the former’s Paul Mescal a Best Actor nod and putting the latter on the shortlist for Best International Feature Film, that were both worlds better than this mess. If the final third existed just as a short film, I’d probably extol its merits, and praise the way the ending is open to multiple interpretations, too. Instead it’s just a tantalizing glimpse at what this film might have been if anyone had reined Östlund in. However, I do look forward to his next film, The Trapezoid of Mild Irritation.

The Square.

I imagine Sweden’s national tourism board is rather unhappy with the country’s portrayal in The Square, as writer-director Ruben Östlund has crafted a dense, multilayered, nonlinear, unfocused narrative that depicts Stockholm’s art community as a bunch of loonies. It’s fascinating, even gripping, frequently cringeworthy, twice offensive, too long by about ten minutes, and incisively satirical. Östlund doesn’t land all his punches, but the ones he lands hit hard. The film is mostly in Swedish, with subtitles; it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year and is Sweden’s submission for the 90th Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film honor.

Claes Bang plays Christian, the director of a modern art museum in Stockholm that tries to present edgy, post-modern installations, but often falls short of its own pretensions, a fact established and skewered in an early scene where American journalist Anne (Elizabeth Moss) asks him to explain a description from the museum’s official site. Christian is also dealing with an outside marketing agency to develop advertising for an upcoming installation, called The Square, that is just a lit square on the ground and a plaque explaining what the square is in vague philosophical terms – not exactly the most media-friendly piece of art. Christian is also robbed of his wallet and phone in an early scene, leading to a comically disastrous plan to recover the goods when his tech guy, Michael (Christopher Læssø), helps him locate the phone via GPS tracking.

Other plot threads and details appear late in the film, enough that mentioning them would spoil the effect even though they’re not plot twists – they’re just stuff the script forgot to mention earlier on in the proceedings. That gives the entire film a sense of unreality, which I’d compare favorably to the hysterical realism of Zadie Smith or Paul Beatty, and unfavorably to the failed experimental novel The Unconsoled, which also concerned an artist, by Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro’s narrative makes sharp, jarring turns that lack narrative or thematic connections, and subplots are dropped without resolution, never to return. It’s unclear if the main character is even awake for some scenes, or dreaming, or hallucinating. The Square walks a similarly tortuous path, with more clarity that it’s all (probably) real, instead simply bouncing Christian from bad decision to bad decision, and introducing details – like the end of the performance art piece at the banquet, or the whole thing with Anne’s roommate – that are just never explained. This is hysterical realism bordering on the transgressive, with mixed results, but still earning high points for ambition.

Christian himself is part narcissist – to the extent that someone can be only partly narcissistic – and part idiot, calling to mind Sherman McCoy of The Bonfire of the Vanities, another antihero who does something incredibly stupid, only to have it come back around and ruin his life. McCoy had it coming, while Christian isn’t quite so loathsome, just governed too much by his instinct for self-preservation and a little too in love with the power of his position. He gets small chances for redemption near the end of the film, and largely takes them, although it can’t thoroughly rehabilitate his character or atone for the wrongs he’s done some other people (a la Ian McEwan’s Atonement).

The targets of this film’s satirical side are numerous, from the art world, especially modern art, to consumer culture to our willful ignorance of others’ suffering to the anachronisms of the upper class to sex, the last rather thoroughly demonstrated by one of the most joyless sex scenes I can remember seeing. The movie’s pièce de résistance, the aforementioned performance art scene at a banquet for the museum’s chief benefactors, manages to tear down multiple targets, including the fatuous nature of such self-congratulatory dinners, the idea of the artist being ‘totally’ committed to his work to the point of madness, the animal nature of man, and the bystander effect, the last two coming in the scene’s culmination of a physical and attempted sexual assault. Again, after the scene ends, there isn’t so much as another reference to any of it – it’s yet another disaster for the museum, but everyone proceeds the next day as if it never happened.

The Square is bursting with ideas, and many of them fail to hit their marks or are pushed via metaphors that are just too strong or on the nose. The modern art mockery is fish in a barrel stuff – really, that could have been one of the museum’s installations. The simian allusions are similarly too easy. But then there are scenes like the overhead shot of Christian rifling through garbage where the camera is high enough that his white shirt and brown hair just look like two more bags in the sea of trash, or the spiraling shot of a staircase (also top-down) as Christian climbs multiple floors but appears to make no progress.

No idea comes across more consistently in the film, however, than our numbness to the suffering of strangers, even when it’s right in front of us. Banquet goers put their heads down even as there’s a physical attack happening in front of them. Commuters ignore beggars in the street, the mall, the train station, and ignore the charity worker asking people if they’d stop for a minute “to save a life.” The video produced by the marketing agency, which is an obvious disaster along the lines of the SB Nation puff piece on rapist Daniel Holtzclaw, turns the idea inside out by preying on people’s sympathy for a fictional character crafted to maximize the viewers’ emotional reactions. It’s the one truly pervasive theme in the movie, and the closest thing the script has to a unifying element.

For all of that weightiness, The Square is also very funny, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes more “I can’t believe this is happening” funny, but even with its bleak view of humanity, the movie does go for some big laughs. There’s a fight over a condom, an argument interrupted by an art installation that keeps making noise at inopportune moments, another installation damaged in comical fashion by a night cleaner, and the sheer idiocy of the marketing agency bros. At nearly two and a half hours, it needs some levity to keep it moving – and many scenes in the first half go on a few beats too long – but the film will likely keep everyone who sees it thinking about all of its ideas for days.

But seriously, what is the deal with Anne’s roommate?