Sadness of some shape will now perhaps forever be associated with this satire which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes film festival: its beautiful young star Charlbi Dean died in August of a freak infection. Her scenes are impressive, but the film itself is bafflingly overrated: strident, derivative and dismayingly deficient in genuine laughs, Ruben Östlund’s new movie is a heavy-handed Euro-satire, without the subtlety and insight of his breakthrough movie Force Majeure, or the power of his comparable Palme-winning spectacle about the art world, The Square. This film, on the other hand, congratulates itself deafeningly on being against the cruelty of the global super-rich, against the trite culture of fashion, against the vapidity of social media influencers. It uses a howitzer to shoot drugged fish in a barrel, inserts flabby lite-surrealism where the comedy might otherwise go and the plot turns out to be a retread of JM Barrie’s stage-play The Admirable Crichton.
Everything of interest happens in the first ten minutes. A male model called Carl (Harris Dickinson) senses after a calamitous audition that his career is already on the rocks, all washed up. One of the art directors makes a mean comment about his “triangle of sadness”: the frowny zone just above his eyebrows. Later he has a furious row with his Instagram princess/model girlfriend Yaya (Dean) because in her selfish Anna Delvey-esque way, she expects him to pick up the bill.
