Ruben Östlund describes himself as a socialist, and on the surface his films exhibit a flair for zeitgeisty political engagement, lampooning luxury ski resorts and the hypocrisies of the nuclear family in Force Majeure (2014), the pretensions of the art world in The Square (2017), and now the excesses of the super-rich in Triangle of Sadness. Careful to avoid charges of piety or sanctimony, however, he approaches these subjects with hyperbolic levity. While The Square zoomed in on the space of the prestige gallery as a case study in nonsensical markets, his latest film, Triangle of Sadness, reaches for greater heights. Offering a series of parables about extractive systems of global surplus and lack (business, war, leisure and their attendant divisions of labour), the film is a modern Chaucerian chamber piece that satirises the cruelties of the upper classes. Structured around three acts, each part of Triangle of Sadness explores the political undercurrents that exist in three symbolic locations: an expensive restaurant, a luxury yacht and a deserted island after disaster strikes onboard. The film follows Yaya (Charlbi Dean), a famous influencer-model, and Carl (Harris Dickinson), her less successful male model partner. Following a prologue in which we discover, through Carl, the hardships of the male modelling industry, Part One moves to an expensive restaurant in which Carl and Yaya fight over the bill, a low-stakes dialogue on issues of gendered wage disparity. Part Two transplants the couple onto a yacht for the mega-rich (a trip “gifted” to Yaya as an influencer), where they are surrounded by various representations of evil: English arms dealers and Russian oligarchs. Through a visual roster of bright blue waves, sunglasses and champagne, the audience is eased into elite society.
Politically committed film, the Östlund project declares, can be done differently. It can make money while ensuring its audiences still detect the glimmering moral seriousness shaping its analysis. It can be bold not boring, thereby fencing off the spectre of a dull Marxist left while marking its distance from an apoplectic conservative right. Onboard, political commentary is delivered by the ship’s drunken captain (Woody Harrelson), who turns out to be a Marxist, in the midst of a nervous breakdown possibly brought on by the rift between his politics and his profession. The film switches between upstairs and downstairs – from the deck hands, kitchen staff and cleaners to the ship’s guests – but it is far more at ease visualising wealth than the hard graft of physical labour. Part Three jettisons some of the guests onto a seemingly uninhabited island and attempts to imagine a reversal of the economic status quo in which those who can fish and build fires become the new power holders. By tightly enclosing the action of each scene in a fixed location, Östlund makes society into a microcosm through which he can channel a contradictory swirl of political affects and persuasions. This could have been executed intelligently, but instead Östlund collapses class structures into neat human metonyms, each group represented by a single avatar, as he intrepidly ticks off a shopping list of big issues: the interplay of class and gender; the evils of consumption; the existence of the fundamental competitive and hierarchical drive in human nature. Each act is marked by helpful political motifs which function as placeholders to underscore the politics at play and link the drama to a history of ideas beyond the screen. As a marooned billionaire recites in deadening catechism: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.
But as Östlund sets the world to rights he stays light on his feet. Too long, slow or heavy and his aim to “say something about society” while “making films that are driven by the need to please audiences and make money” might founder. Pursuing the contradictions between political gravity and tonal levity at a formal level, Östlund’s films synthesise disjunctures between form and content, working to smoothly arrange their messy subject matter and encase the hard edge of critique in a softer rush of imagery. But can this complex juggle of contradictions avoid a short-circuiting political compromise? Not really. Instead, Östlund makes the unpalatable parts of what might be a radical politics digestible. In the restaurant scene of the first act, where the script probes questions of gender, wage distribution and tradition, the camera darts back and forth between Yaya and Carl to quickly signal socially-prescribed positionalities in crisis – enough to demonstrate the awkwardness of the conversation without subjecting its audience, too strenuously, to their elongated pauses. As the couple fights in the taxi, the camera swings pendulum-like over their heads, as in a rally at a tennis match, an arch critique that transfigures dialogue to parodic exemplar, linking this conversation to all those arguments in which political discussion fragments into bickering (this scene was apparently based on an argument Östlund had with his wife). There is an irony that, as the characters discuss how hard it is to talk about money, Östlund’s restless camera reproduces this failure, fidgeting about and burying the argument in stylisation.
Östlund never tires of this approach. Moving across the yacht in Part Two, the camera surveys the glistening decks, panelled dining rooms and plush cabins as guests get drunk, take selfies and browse expensive gifts in the vessel’s shop. the rocking of the ship and the off-key framing of objects, shot widescreen, signal a virtuous distaste with them, dulling the glint of each commodity, the frame set slightly at an angle as if to anticipate an audience with their heads cocked in a kind of sociological bemusement. But the manufacture of such easy disdain is lazy and mechanical, a technical fait accompli. Formally, this might feel satirical, but little is being said. A man shouts, “I’m so fucking rich”. Each shot deadeningly restates this fact. Nudging the viewer towards judgement, but without more strenuous incitements towards anger or earnestness, the camera functions as a detached observer of easy moral principle, spoon-feeding us the same lesson over and over. As such, the film rejects sustained, radical engagement for observational platitudes. When, in Part Three, the yacht is washed up on a beach, the film trades capitalist hierarchy for a new competitive pecking order of food hoarding and sexual bartering.[1] Jettisoning the chance to imagine the world beyond Malthusian quips about a struggle for pretzels, the jokes never reach beyond obvious conservative imaginaries. In fact, in Östlund’s telling, it is the billionaires who become most comradely, while the working-class female maintenance staff from the ship become preoccupied with petty power struggles, manufacturing further scarcity. While the demise of patriarchy is celebrated in the script – “you’ve managed to run a fucking matriarchy!” – the film represents the concerns of women as vicious squabbles over men and sexual status, so that it is in fact a knowing chauvinist superiority that informs the logic of the humour.
Critics have praised the film’s central twenty-five minute long vomit-filled sequence as a grotesque extravaganza: “the most disgusting film of 2022”, “almost horrifyingly disgusting. Bring a barf bag!”. This seems to be what Östlund was hoping for since, at press screenings of the film, the audience was offered vomit bags should the sequence be too much to stomach. Conceptually, the scene regurgitates the central conceit of the The Square’s art world dinner sequence, in which a deus ex machina (a man acting as a gorilla) disturbs the elite pageantry of overconsumption. In Triangle of Sadness, the guests assemble for the so-called “Captain’s Dinner” and immaculately dressed waiters serve meals from gold salvers. The camera frames the dishes in artless close-up, golden forks poised to dive into grilled octopus, translucent jellies and coiffured salads. When a storm picks up, the millionaire class are plunged into a hurricane of seasickness, and Östlund patchworks together shots of shit, piss and sick as the guests and their toilets explode across the yacht. Gathering an arsenal of grotesque props and special effects, he works to affix images of extreme greed and foul effluence to ideas of intense wealth. On one level, Östlund seems to posit a direct relationship between an excess of vomit and an intensity of critique. In contrast to the radical tradition of “the world turned upside down,”[2] which aims to write a new history from below, Östlund instead renders society merrily askew. But so assured is the film in its fundamental righteous purpose and subject matter that it fails to notice how far it has danced away – slyly, playfully – from any sense of socialist critique.
Thus, at the film’s spectacular crescendo Östlund performs a strange act of substitution, disappearing the politics it claims to summon. While socialism is shoehorned into the script, in a conversation where the ship’s captain and the Russian millionaire trade-off Marx and Reagan quotations, it remains window-dressing – a punch line – undermined by the political logic of rapprochement. Seen in this light it is tempting to ask what the point of the sequence really is: nearly half an hour of puke but for the spectacle of political commitment to be undermined by a concessionary sentimentalism. On the terms of Östlund’s allegory, are we only to wish for the super-rich to eat a little less next time? In their 1969 manifesto, Towards a Third Cinema, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino describe Hollywood cinema as “a spectacle aimed at a digesting object,” arguing that the slick montage of the studio system enabled the easy-feeding of hegemonic ideology to American audiences. In their rendering, the audience can watch or consume, but is rarely invoked or challenged as scenes slide by. Such films are formally invested in the maintenance of cinematic order, even if the content seems anarchic. As European art cinema assumes the former prestige of Hollywood, so too Östlund is happy to adopt its forms. Gliding deftly about the boat, in quick shots that do not linger on each outpouring, even Östlund’s vomit scenes are weirdly watchable, and so a cinema that is doubly sybaritic prompts the question of who is being over-fed: character or audience? While Triangle of Sadness tries to be a film about over-consumption it formally reproduces the politics it strives to critique.
Östlund talks a lot about his mother. She raised him as a socialist and is still “very active in the Communist Party”. He made his first film, a critique of NATO, with her in 2015. In interviews she is frequently summoned as an emblem of his radical commitment, shorthand association to histories of left thought and organising. The same shorthand afflicts Triangle of Sadness, which crams in Marxist characters and quotes as if the mere iconography of Marx elaborates a Marxism. In his 1966 essay Political Commitment, Stuart Hall describes the diminishing of political consciousness as the “experiencing of issues which are public in character as an unrelated series of private grouses,” disarticulating broad political concerns into singular complaints.[3] At stake for Hall was “not a matter of politics in the narrow sense” but how “a society makes of its own life”. It is a strange thing to make a film nominally about the necessities of political confrontation that functions, in every sense, through the minor key of conciliation. A film that appears to reckon loudly with how a society makes its life falters, slowly, into a grumble. For all his self-belief in his aptitude to slickly skewer, Östlund cannot see how political commitment can get lost, must be marshalled at every point or risk shading into that very different thing: the equivocatory commentariat critique. Most comfortable in its all-out blaze of high fashion, yachts, expensive food, and jewellery, the film’s cynicism and formal sleight-of-hand lacquer over any sense of radical political excitement. Ridiculing this shiny exterior, Östlund’s politics – shifting, glossy and translucent – stay surface: not revolution as rupture but as a spinning wheel.
Georgie Carr is working on a PhD on the racialised articulations of British police policy, town planning and police filmmaking practices. She is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers.
[1] James Wham, Crowd Pleaser. Sidecar (June 2022)
[2] Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down. (1984: Penguin)
[3] Stuart Hall. Political Commitment. (1966). In (eds. Stuart Hall and Sally Davidson). Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays. (2017: Duke University Press)