Progress is really just stumbling in circles

Let's just turn the whole thing around

There are only pretzel sticks, salvaged from a washed-up lifeboat. One of the ship's toilet maids (Dolly De Leon) is the only one who knows how to catch fish and make fire. She immediately recognizes her gain in power and summons the young, beautiful model Carl (Harris Dickinson) to her as a bedtime treat.

The situation for the handsome is tricky: should he obey the new boss? At least she feeds him and his girlfriend. But what does she want from him anyway? Guess what, counters his girlfriend, the model Yaya (played by Charlbi Dean Kriek, who recently died unexpectedly of a viral infection), from whom he seeks advice. As a young, beautiful woman with ambitions, she must be familiar with such things.

What follows is oppressively funny: staring ahead in tears, as if bad memories ran in front of her inner eye, she gives her boyfriend tips. "Laugh at their jokes," she advises, but "no kisses," "nothing sexual." Neck massage: okay.

Carl promises and fails so quickly that the film, despite its two and a half hour length, doesn't even bother to show Carl's dwindling limits in all detail.

This scene may seem insignificant in a film full of brutal imbalances, but better than any contribution to the debate, it perhaps provides even the most macho redistribution skeptic some insight into the functioning of a world where prevailing class and gender relations make it difficult not only for women, freedom and dignity to preserve and survive (economically).

In order to get to the heart of these value chains, in the previous chapter Östlund put the influencer couple at a table with a filthy rich Russian fertilizer manufacturer (Zlatko Burić) on the luxury yacht that has not yet sunk. The oligarch proudly: "I sell shit." The young beauty, who is simulating an eating process for the photo with a full fork of spaghetti, explains in turn that she receives nice things like this cruise with her social media posts.

Aha, your looks paid for this trip, the old man nods knowingly while his wife (Sunnyi Melles) sips champagne. Beauty and shit, both are equally raw materials and end products of the market, only the distribution channels are of different lengths.

That's the line that "Triangle Of Sadness" traces with geometric indifference: from the marketing of youthful attractiveness to the power of the super-rich, down to the self-empowerment of those migrants in the hull without whom the whole place would have perished much sooner.

In the 25-minute slim first part, "Carl and Yaya", the film still pretends to impale the superficiality of the fashion industry. At the model casting, 25-year-old Carl is allowed to hear that he should relax the region of his frown lines, or "triangle of sadness" in English, or do botox right away.

As a male model, he earns less than his girlfriend, which is why an argument about gender roles and money escalates at the expensive restaurant after Yaya refuses to pay the bill. But instead of wanting to penetrate the character traits of the individuals, the film prefers to turn to their positions in the economic structure and studies their behavior under changing conditions in the laboratory situations yacht and island.

The puke and diarrhea orgy on the original Aristotle-Onassis ship at the captain's dinner will not be forgotten in its Rabelaisian splendor in a hurry. The catastrophic begins in the calm waters of prosperous weariness: Sunnyi Melles as the oligarch's wife Vera, in a philanthropic mood, forces the entire staff to bathe immediately and "enjoy the moment".

So do some microorganisms in the deserted kitchen, while the film almost turns into a tragic comedy about an unrecognized intellectual. Because the Marxist captain (Woody Harrelson) would rather get drunk than give the spoiled tax evaders a nice evening.

When the storm came up, he read out socially critical texts over the on-board loudspeakers, but the oyster slurpers increasingly lacked the leisure for fine-spirited things. Above all Melles, but also a British arms manufacturer couple with the Churchill first names Winston (Oliver Ford Davies) and Clementine (Amanda Walker) as well as Iris Berben as a paralytic who, after a stroke, only wrote "In the Clouds", "Yes", "No" and "Uli" can say, the soul and everything else will play out of the body.

"Plat", "hollow", "unsubtle": Hardly any Cannes winner has divided the critics as much as "Triangle Of Sadness", which is now coming to the cinemas. Still, some grudgingly admitted that it's hard not to laugh. But even then it was often said that the director, after his bashing of the art scene "The Square", for which he also won the Palme d'Or in 2017, did not get beyond the rather conservative realization that money rules the world and that the rich are often not nice people.

The world isn't that complex, countered Östlund. We'd just get bombarded with too much "crap that doesn't explain anything" and overlook the simplest truths. Not so under-complex, "Triangle Of Sadness" gives time and again the opportunity to catch oneself being overlooked: be it an older Filipina who was not noticed in the yacht chapter because Östlund dispensed with any staged exclamation mark that would point to her future importance as a Island regent would have pointed out.

Or the captain, who is actually invisible for long stretches and who barricades himself drinking. Until he engages in a refreshing exchange of blows with the oligarch with anti-capitalist (he) and anti-communist (the Russian) quotes and the effort with which he camouflages his suffering in the world as friendly-fatalistic self-costuming becomes visible.

“Triangle Of Sadness” can do a bit more than just provocation for provocation's sake. The consistently simple farce about human depravity reads as a fitting commentary on just about everything that has gone wrong for a surprisingly long time. In particular, the relevance of those categories that serve as a basis for existence in the identity debates is pulverized: male and female, old and young, poor and rich, global north and south.

A new regime is emerging under the former toilet attendant, not a better one, not even a matriarchy with a migration background, just because the new ruler is Filipina and a woman. The subject doesn't matter, only the roles are reversed, progress is a stumbling in a circle.

To paraphrase the closing scene of Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless," not "you really puke," as one police officer misrepresented Jean-Paul Belmondo's last words. No: "It," it really sucks.