When Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund won the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for “Triangle of Sadness,” it put him in the rarified class of two-time Palme d’Or winners. The prestigious group also includes Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Haneke, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Emir Kusturica, Shohei Imamura, Bille August, Alf Sjoberg and Ken Loach.
But none of those titans of international cinema ever won for a film with an outrageously extended sequence of passengers aboard a luxury yacht violently vomiting and soiling themselves during a storm at sea. Ostlund, 48, prides himself on upending the traditions of upscale art cinema, creating biting social satires in his previous films, “Force Majeure” and the Palme d’Or-winning “The Square,” with surgical precision. Taken together, they compose an informal trilogy on privilege and contemporary male anxiety. But besides being trenchant examinations of modern life, his movies are also very fun.
In “Triangle of Sadness” — the title refers to the area at the top of the nose and between the eyebrows, often fixed with Botox — a male model Carl (Harris Dickinson), insecure about the financial success of his model/influencer girlfriend, Yaya (Charlbi Dean), accompanies her aboard a luxury yacht with a drunken Marxist captain (Woody Harrelson). When a violent storm causes all the guests to become extremely seasick and the ship itself to crash, a group of survivors land on a seemingly deserted island. That’s where Abigail (Dolly de Leon), a cleaning woman from the ship, suddenly assumes an increasingly tyrannical leadership position thanks to her practical skills, such as knowing how to start a fire.
