It’s still ironic that Hollywood has now taken to messing with the richest, as if they were not throwing stones at their own roof. However, there is something refreshing in works like ‘Daggers in the back: the mystery of the Glass Onion’ or ‘The triangle of sadness’: the subversion of a lifestyle, the generational anger of class, the denigration of an opulent lifestyle. You can be rich, yes, but you don’t have to be a jerk too.
A model film
Ruben Östlund is a misunderstood person who is very quickly dismissed as “superficial”, “minor” or even “fraud”. ‘The square’ was a great little marvel incisive and direct against the world of contemporary art that perhaps opened more wounds than many are willing to admit, and in ‘The triangle of sadness’ he has not been intimidated by criticism, redoubling on humor (the great sin of the current box office), lowering subtlety to a minimum and influencing criticism of a lifestyle as absurd as it is irresistibly parodyable.
Divided into three parts very well differentiated from each other, the film does not avoid the funny, the cheap humor that serves as a hilarious contrast in the face of the fine irony on the part of the proposal. ‘The triangle of sadness’ begins as a vile sarcasm against the rich and ends as the revenge of the eternal class struggle, showing an endless cycle that may seem obvious but hides much more: a dissection made with a scalpel of a rotten society and reigned by extreme posturing.
The latest Cannes winner disguises a devastating speech with more or less rude jokes (There is a scene that seems to take ‘This boy is a demon 2’ as a reference) and hides a host of characters as charismatic as they are cartoonish. Demagogic? Of course. But it’s hard to empathize with a rich man whose parody isn’t all that different from reality. And Ruben Östlund has wisely taken advantage of a general feeling to get the most out of it.
The triangle of laughter
It is said a lot these days that cinema should not be politicalas if it had not been since the silent movies, but ‘The triangle of sadness’ ignores any easy whining: Don’t want politics in your narrative? Well, take two and a half cups. Of course there will be those who get angry with the director, but it is unfair: if you’ve seen ‘The square’ you know what you’re coming to in this contemporary part of his filmography.
The film also subverts what anyone can understand as “art and essay cinema”. A Cannes winner replete with dirty jokes, vaudeville gags and vomit battles? In a world with increasing interest in drama and serious cinema, making a comedy that plays with the crude and dressing it up with prestige is the ultimate declaration of intent. You may not like it, you may be disappointed, you may not laugh, or you may even consider that what Östlund is attempting is a failed pantomime, but you have to admit that no one is taking risks like him.
‘The triangle of sadness’ is one of those films in which you can enter headlong in its first minutes or navigate the water of boredom for two and a half hours. I must admit that, although I was overwhelmed by the obscenity of its second part, the subtle irony of the beginning and the contemporary class struggle of its last minutes made me have one of the funniest moments of the last San Sebastián festival. Between period dramas and meta-cinematic reflections, there is a hilarious and shameless parody.
Shipwreck as you can!
You will have noticed that throughout the review I have tried to put some distance with the tape. I would highly recommend it for the classy sarcasm moments that work. (that model asking the ship’s workers to hide) or for her scenes of kaffir humor, but it is impossible to be positive with her blindly without knowing your interlocutor. ‘The triangle of sadness’ is so honest and transparent in its intentions that it can cause rejection if you don’t get into the game.
And yet There’s something about the constant vaudeville showwhich includes characters who can only say one sentence and models capable of sleeping with anyone for a piece of bread, which avoids failure and ends up exceeding your expectations until an ending that culminates the satire in the only possible way: with black humor, irony and, almost, the fall of the curtain and the end of the show. Because, in the end, ‘El triángulo de la tristeza’ is just that: a circus show on three tracks in which the clowns don’t wear their faces painted.
Östlund wants you to leave the cinema giving your opinion about the film: It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. ‘The triangle of sadness’, despite its ominous title, takes all situations to the extreme so that the viewer has no option of leaving without having a debate, even internally, about it. And that’s fabulous. The director takes the subtlety that he shows off in his first bars and he mercilessly crushes it with loud hammer blows that, deep down, resonate with ourselves. Of course: the result of the destruction you may not like. You shouldn’t like it, actually. It is what remains after the shipwreck.