Palme d’Or à Cannes In May, the new satire of the Swedish filmmaker opens the valves of flashy nihilism.
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For Ruben Östlund, we should no longer wait much from our contemporaries: capitalism has liquidated the last plots of humanity, only remain puppets in a world cut in half, some of the water, The others triumph over the trade, to the point of selling “shit”, as this billionaire vacationer assumes aboard a yacht, who made a fortune in the anti-personnel mines.
There is only to hunt, tells us in substance – and in pictures – the director in a wink supported at La Grande Bouffe (1973), by Marco Ferreri. But what appeared to be subversive in the 1970s was only yet another overflow in 2022. With without filter (Triangle of Sadness), Ruben Östlund once again received the Palme d’Or in Cannes in May, hands of the president of the jury, Vincent Lindon, after having obtained it in 2017 with The Square, satire in vitriol of contemporary art.
For two and a half hours, the film takes its time to make its characters grove, in an entertainment in three paintings, mixing class and genres’ struggle (the matriarchy also takes it for its rank). The actors are very good, but the annoying tendency of the director to explain to us life long and wide (from the first scene) is an arrogant hair, not to say superfluous. Because what he tells us is not that new. Act I immerses us in the fashion and modeling world, where we discover, in the midst of shoot, a young melancholy model, Carl (Harris Dickinson), the eyebrows continuously frowning – such is the “triangle of sadness” which gives the film its international title.
In automatic pilot, in front of photographers, Carl knows perfectly with cheap brands, or playing hard for haute couture. His fiancée, the top model Yaya – Charlbi Dean, actress and model, died a few weeks ago, Monday August 29, at the age of 32 – spends her time “post” her dream life on social networks . His beauty allows him to be invited, with Carl, on a luxury cruise (Act II), where the small staff learned to say yes to everything. When the time comes, the Captain of the Yacht (Woody Harrelson), failing, will deliver some moments of hilarity.
no political vision
The cruise, its hand: it will take a storm and a shipwreck to reset the class reports. The group of survivors on a desert island will find itself under the thumb of a subordinate employee of the yacht, it taking up power in a stupid and nasty mode (Act III). Salauds of poor! In some places, the comedy of Ruben Östlund exudes basic nihilism. Perhaps it is for this reason that the director could observe that “the left press” did not like his film. Filter without filter does not bother with any political vision, the same one who lived another camera on the rich and the poor, the virtuoso and icing parasite (2019), from the South Korean Bong Joon-Ho, himself haloed by the Palme d’Or.
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