This year’s Cannes brought another member into the double-Palme club, the directors who have won it twice, to go with Ken Loach and the Dardenne brothers – among others. Ruben Östlund, who won the big prize in 2017 for his art world black-comedy The Square, now picks up the Palme again for another geometrically entitled movie: Triangle of Sadness, a glossy, sexually charged satire on fashion, globalisation, narcissist culture and the super-rich.
Well, maybe this is film that the world needs now: discomfort-food cinema, feelbad cinema, but also cinema that doesn’t upset us too much and flatters our sense of who the bad guys are. We need a movie about a bunch of obnoxious rich idiots on a boat heading for nowhere and who deserve to die, a film that expresses our cynical and exhausted dismissal of the world, but also something that doesn’t challenge our own sensibilities too much. That’s the mood we’re all in and maybe Triangle of Sadness addresses that mood. Triangle of Sadness could well be speaking to the zeitgeist, but not as interestingly (or as originally) as it thinks.
