In the opening scenes of the 2022 Cannes Palme d'Or winner Triangle of Sadness, the gender pay gap comes up for scrutiny. But not, perhaps, in the way you'd expect.
Ruben Östlund's satire about the fashion industry and the uber rich begins with a lovers' quarrel in a restaurant between two models – the bill arrives and they argue over who should pay it.
The pair is exceptionally well-cast.
Harris Dickinson (Where the Crawdads Sing) is Carl, a softly spoken Englishman with pouty good looks who's increasingly wrong-footed by events, while the late Charlbi Dean, who died tragically in August, is Yaya, a charming but wily European with a chirpy American accent that's like an air kiss at a cocktail party.
Conventional etiquette suggests it's the man's responsibility to pay, but as a male model, Carl earns significantly less than Yaya, and, he reminds her, it's her shout. It sinks in for a moment that they each have very different ideas about what's expected of them at this juncture, and it's not long before the tension erupts into an all-out argument over the power imbalance in their relationship, and gender expectations more generally.
"We shouldn't just slip into the stereotypical gender-based roles," Carl pleads with her, exasperated.
Triangle of Sadness is the third film by Swedish writer-director Östlund (following 2014's Force Majeure and 2017's The Square) that's set in the glamorous and exclusive worlds of the privileged classes, and subjects its characters, especially its men, to some eye-wateringly brutal humiliations and comeuppances.
Its shifting focus means Carl is not, strictly speaking, the film's protagonist, but his questioning of gender expectations in the first act echoes throughout the film, in ways he, for one, will least expect.
Östlund's satirical approach is a lot like a stand-up comedian's, riffing on a single idea until the gag surpasses the threshold of our expectations and attains some overblown, glorious absurdity.
It doesn't always work – the film's opening, in which a fashion journalist interviews a group of male models, feels like a deleted scene from the awful Zoolander 2.
But when his satire does work, the result can be riotously funny.
Östlund's use of sudden forces of chaos to sow havoc has become a trademark by now. In The Square, his other Palme d'Or winner, it was a violent performance artist pretending to be a monkey, terrorising attendees at an art museum gala. In Force Majeure, it was an avalanche that engulfed an alfresco restaurant, laying bare the cowardice of a young father of two.
Here, it's a storm.
The second act of the film unfolds on a luxury yacht – a beige ocean cruiser with Des'ree's upbeat 90s earworm Life on high rotation — where Carl and Yaya have scored free passage in exchange for promotion on her Instagram.
From The Poseidon Adventure to Titanic, a ship in a movie is a great leveller of class and other social distinctions, as long as something bad happens. When the almighty tempest hits, the mostly elderly, extremely wealthy passengers are sitting down to a formal dinner hosted by the captain.
The vessel starts bobbing like a cork on the ocean, and most of the guests become violently ill.
The gross, hilarious spectacle that follows, in which people projectile vomit, slip in their own excrement and end up on the floor clambering about in raw sewerage, is the stuff of sideshow schadenfreude.
It's like a supercut of celebrities falling into a dunk tank or politicians getting whacked with cream pies — an extended sequence, choreographed with slapstick precision, that provides the undeniable thrill and spiteful buzz of watching vain, powerful people suddenly stripped of their dignity.
While it's a gleeful, unsubtle swipe at capitalist elites, the rest of the film isn't quite so straightforward.
It's undoubtedly an examination of privilege and power, but its focus extends to those lower down the pecking order, too – from the ship's mostly white crew above deck, to its mostly Filipinx cleaning staff below (here we're gifted a poignant performance from veteran actor Dolly de Leon, the film's surprise antihero).
What transpires among the crew after disaster strikes reflects Östlund's somewhat jaded view of humanity as a whole. By the end of the film, it's clear that he believes that, given the chance, the oppressed will topple any existing order only to replace it with a new, equally unjust hierarchy that suits them better.
A scene that reflects this deep scepticism depicts the yacht's captain (Woody Harrelson) – an alcoholic American Marxist – in a drunken verbal sparring match with one of his passengers, a happily gone-to-seed Russian oligarch (an excellent Zlatko Burić). The two playfully throw favourite lines at each other from their political heroes – citations from Marx collide with one-liners from Reagan.
It's a scene that suggests each side of the ideological divide is a mere inversion of the other, and neither is of any consequence (Östlund has traced this ambivalence to witnessing family arguments between his communist mother and neoliberal brother).
But there is one idea that Östlund seems intent on treating seriously, and that's the idea of the inequality between women and men. To avoid spoilers, it's safest to return to Yaya, and the argument over the bill.
For long stretches of that scene, as the couple argue on the ride home and in the hotel lift, it's as if Carl has made the compelling point about his relative disadvantage as a male model.
But something Yaya says reminds us of the high fashion bubble the couple inhabit, and that beyond that bubble, the real world is not so generous to women like her: "I'm a model, honey — the only way for me to get out of this life is to become someone's trophy wife."
Perhaps you could argue against her fatalistic assertion. But fast-forward to the film's finale, and there's nothing ambivalent about what befalls Carl in the final stretches of the movie, as he gets to learn what it's really like to submit to gendered power.
The film's themes land via swings and roundabouts. Ultimately, men like Carl don't know how good they still have it, and women aren't necessarily more inclined to change things once they get into power.
You might think you don't need to be told. Östlund sometimes labours his points. But along the way, he also delivers some hilarious absurdity.
Triangle of Sadness is in cinemas from December 26.
