Unfortunately, the Captain’s Dinner coincides with a brewing and then violent storm at sea, as rattling dishes and distant thunder give way to projectile vomiting and exploding toilets. Much tension is found in the slow, steady escalation of their interactions with the guests, because the crew’s prime directive is to accept whatever nonsense whims they’re presented with.Īll of which leads us to the big set piece, the much-ballyhooed “Captain’s Dinner,” though the Captain (Woody Harrelson, priceless) has spent most of the week in his cabin getting hammered. Östlund goes a step further, exploring the divisions even within the ship’s working class the cleaners and cooks and engineers, hardly seen, are all people of color, while the smiling on-deck crew that fetches drinks and attends to the immediate needs are lily-white (Nordic, even). Such stories of extravagance frequently go the upstairs-downstairs route, contrasting the wealthy and those who serve them. The second part, “THE YACHT,” finds them on a luxury cruise, two of a handful of ultra-rich passengers their fellow travelers include a Russian agriculture magnate (“You can call me the King of Shit,” he roars, of his fortune made in fertilizers) and a kindly, retirement-age British couple who turn out to be munitions manufacturers (“Our best-selling product is the hand grenade,” one chuckles cheerfully). It doesn’t always work, but you get what he’s going for.Ĭarl and Yaya are also fairly prominent in the two sections that follow, though more part of an ensemble. And because it’s so directly in his wheelhouse, it’s easy to understand why he takes that material as merely a starting point for Triangle, and attempts to broaden his scope considerably. Of course, this is Östlund’s stock-in-trade, feeling very much of a piece with the strained social interactions and awkward misconnections of his previous Palme winner The Square and especially his breakthrough film, Force Majeure. It’s like a perfectly realized little short film. What follows is an interaction so perfectly observed and executed that it’s sort of breathtaking – not just what they do, and what they say, and the responses those actions and words provoke, but how all of those details are then revisited and scrutinized, broken apart and reassembled, every wound carefully closed and then savagely reopened. So they’re out to dinner, an expensive one at a posh restaurant, and the waiter drops the check, and neither of them, at least initially, pick it up.
He’s been struggling a bit, as we see at a “runway casting” scene that explores the silliness of auditioning to walk (which as you’d expect, is considerable). His subjects are Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), who are young and beautiful, model-slash-influencers who are apparently doing quite well in that space – or at least, she is. Ruben Östlund’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness is a film told in three distinct parts, labeled with helpful onscreen titles, and the first part is as good as anything he’s ever done – and a perfect encapsulation of what he does well.
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