Film: “The Triangle of Sadness” 2022, Directed by Ruben Östlund

The winner of the Best Film Award of 2022 of the European Film Academy is quite disappointing.

Its best part is the starting scene where we see an audition of male fashion models and the instructions they are being given on how to relax the “triangle of sadness” on their faces or slightly open their mouths in order to “look more available” or how to train the “Balenciaga look” vs the “H&M look.” And the viewer is misled to believe that this will be a scathing and fresh satire of the fashion industry. Instead, the film goes on to become an annoyingly predictable and transparent parable of class conflict, the class of the super-rich or consumerist society. There are some good previous examples in European cinema that did this quite successfully – La Grande Bouffe and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, for example. Ostlund’s creation is a tired imitation of these as well as Bong Joon Ho’s recent film Parasite. The core part of the film is set on a luxury cruise yacht with some of the cliche characters being a Russian oligarch, a weapon manufacturer, a fashion model turned influencer and an IT start-up owner. These representatives of the class of the rich are of course quite obnoxious and we see them eating and drinking and then, you guessed it, throwing up, etc. The poor, again in a quite cliched manner, are represented by the service and crew of the yacht, the “lower deck”, who are servile to the extreme and motivated by money in their submissiveness, while the captain is a drunk and a Marxist. I would rather put the latter in quotation marks because his “Marxism” is “for dummies.” In the third part of the film, after the ship wrecks and all find themselves on an island, the poor take over as they have access to the food supply, and turn out to be quite disgusting as well. The overarching “idea” of the film seems to be that the rich are very very bad and the poor are justified to be bad. And this “idea” is shoved at the audience in a boring and very simplistic manner over the course of two very long hours.

It is quite a pity that this talented director who grabbed the critics’ attention with an original and fresh film like Force Majeure winds up with a stale didactic bore that unfortunately appeals to film juries as it “checks all the boxes.”