Square triangle

The Swedish film – the winner of the Cannes Film Festival “Triangle of Sorrow” was released in Russian distribution. He tried to find a place in the hierarchy of masterpieces of world cinema satire for the new picture of Ruben Ostlund Andrey Plakhov.

The film presents two images of the modern consumer society: an agency where models are selected and prepared for the catwalk, and an ocean cruise with an exclusive line-up of passengers. The protagonists — proletarians of the modeling business Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean, an actress who died of a sudden illness shortly after the Cannes triumph of the film) — have a long showdown in a static, but not at all boring scene in a restaurant. Who pays for dinner is the question, and behind it lies a whole complex of social and gender ambitions. The guy is clearly depressed by the breakdown of traditional roles in the era of the triumph of feminism: is this the reason for the “triangle of sadness” on his young brow?

It’s easy for a woman who has a mind besides beauty to get the better of a dim-witted sex partner: she is an Instagram influencer, and thanks to her, the couple get a free ticket to a superyacht. The “cream of society” has gathered here, that is, billionaire idiots. One is Dimitri, a cynical Russian “shit seller” (fertilizer dealer) with his wife and mistress: he is played by Croatian-born Danish artist Zlatko Buric. The other is the dull Scandinavian Jarmo, who made his fortune on “codes for mobile applications” and is ready to reward girls for their services with “Rolex”. There is also a crazy, semi-paralyzed, rich German woman and a couple of Brits – nice old mushrooms selling mines and grenades.

The ship is run by Paula (Vicky Berlin), a female manager, who teaches her subordinates to answer “Yes!” to the most insane requests of passengers – for example, when the wife of a Russian offers all the attendants to undress and swim, which is strictly prohibited. And the captain of the ship, an ideological Marxist working for the capitalists (sarcastically sarcastic Woody Harrelson), in principle will not dry out from drinking and get out of the cabin; he will appear only at the captain’s dinner, but there the American will perform in such a way that few will seem to anyone. It is during this dinner with black caviar from Russia and Mediterranean delicacies that the yacht will fall into the most severe storm, and the gastronomic orgy will lead to a massive intestinal orgasm with violent eruptions of feces and vomit. Well, the last part of the film will play out with the same characters on a desert island, where the laws of Marxism and class struggle will work in practice, and the role of the new captain will be usurped by the toilet worker Abigail (Filipino actress Dolly de Leon): she is the only one who knows how to catch fish with her hands and make a fire, and he wants to take payment in kind in the form of handsome Karl.

Director Ruben Östlund has long proved his comedic gift, not too frequent in general and least expected from the natives of Sweden. He mastered the basics of absurdity and morbid humor quite well. In the film The Game, combining them with a detached cold style, Östlund ridiculed the tolerance of native Swedes towards immigrants bordering on cowardice. In Force Majeure, with deadly sarcasm, he showed the moral catastrophe of the Swedish family. In The Square, which brought the director the first Cannes Palme d’Or, he turned his attention to the realm of contemporary risk: the humanist curator finds himself involved in a chain of events and relationships that test both himself and the basic principle of political correctness. Already there, in the company of the iconic characters of modern Europe, a Russian appears – a manipulative performer named Oleg Rogozin. At a gala dinner, he terrorizes “high society”, portraying a wild beast: the guests bashfully lower their eyes at the sight of how the monster mocks a woman.

In the “Triangle of Sorrow” there is a lot of familiarity, but even more borrowed than before, Estlund did not seem to have sinned. But the originality of Swedish humor in this international “globalist” story is just not enough. The symbolic ship with the “cream of society” was launched by Federico Fellini (“And the Ship Sails”) and Manuel di Oliveira (“Conversational Film”). Luis Buñuel made his characters prisoners of a surrealistically enclosed space and ritual meals in The Destroying Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Decadent gourmets died in their own excrement in Marco Ferreri’s Big Grub. A communist sailor took social (and sexual) revenge on a wealthy yacht passenger when they were thrown onto a desert island in Lina Wertmüller’s film Carried by an Unusual Destiny into the Azure Sea in August. And it’s not even about borrowing as such. All these films are not only intellectually filled, but charged with powerful energy and passion, the madness of the grotesque, magnificent contempt for the powerful of this world, who, as soon as the halo of privileges falls from them, instantly reveal their pity and insignificance.

Such passion in Ostlund’s film arises only in the scene of a gastronomic hurricane in the midst of a stormy sea, when the captain enters into an alcoholic and verbal duel with Dmitry, pouring out quotes from Marx, Reagan and Thatcher. The rest of the film keeps the intonation of a derisively melancholic “triangle of sadness”, and its satirical component sometimes looks flat, if not “square”.