Duelling Splatter

The Desperate Man by Gustave Courbet; graphic by Chase Manze

I don't know that it's an inherently funny thing to watch someone, even an aristocrat, vomit and shit themselves simultaneously, before sliding around on a linoleum floor coated in a combination of both. And yet, when watched shoulder-to-shoulder with 1,000 other degenerates, it's the funniest goddamn thing in the world. Triangle of Sadness has already become known as the vomit movie, an absurdist gross-out farce. Hell, it's in the trailer, on the posters. All the same, the first instance of projectile vomiting was greeted with a round of stunned, hesitantly amused laughter, but as the rain continued to pour, sometimes chunky, always orange, it was as though the crowd grew rapidly desensitized, and the laughter grew. Practically cacophonous by the time the fearful passengers on screen, all white, all wealthy, hopped from side to side along carpeted hallways to avoid the river of brown sludge running through. All of this is to say, the film thrives at the peak of its absurdity, and Östland's screenplay is as adept and comic as its two most immediate predecessors: Force Majeure and The Square. Like those films, Triangle of Sadness has a clear and distinct viewpoint, and a message Östland hopes to convey. Unfortunately, the message is two-dimensional and delivered with about as much subtly as a woman in pearls subsumed under a river of shit.

The film becomes an ensemble piece with a wide array of colorful characters, but not until the second act. At first it's a two-hander. The audience meets Carl (Harris Dickinson) at a cattle call audition for male models. Dickinson is handsome with sharp features, and his Carl appears shameless, totally willing to act foolish for the sake of advancing his personal brand. He vogues for a camera crew lingering around the waiting area, smiling and pouting as a man shouts the names of different brands, and takes extensive criticism from the panel of casting directors once he makes it to the end. Eager enough to perform, aware enough to know when he's been picked over. His girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean), a more model/influencer, treats him as a secondary figure in her life, identifying their relationship as a mutually beneficial arrangement that boosts both their social media followings. Many of the film's best moments come early within this intimate set of scenes. Carl and Yaya fight about money. The fight begins in a fine dining restaurant when the bill arrives, and continues back to their shared hotel. One of the great feats of this film is its ability to shift from micro moments to macro moments without losing the impact of either. Carl ranting and raving about feeling obligated to pick up the check as the elevator doors separating him from Yaya attempt to close, only for him to rip them open in increasingly comical ways, is not only hilarious, but a counter-balance for what's to come as the plot shifts more towards extremes.

The extremes come in the second act, as Carl and Yaya appear on a private cruise for the über-wealthy hosted on a $125 million-dollar yacht. They've been gifted tickets for free, due to their status as influencers, leaving them totally apart from the other guests: old-money oligarchs, weapons manufacturers, big tech wizards. The cast expands exponentially as Östland shifts from room to room, capturing the crew and those who they'll be waiting on. It's here that the central jokes first appear and quickly wear thin. "Eat the rich," he says. "Capitalism is a cancer and those who've profited from it to extreme degrees deserve what's coming to them." Hell yeah, brother. The crowd I watched this with agrees. However, when your scathing critique of capitalism consists of repeatedly introducing characters who do comically bad or self-involved things, it grows tired. There are, no doubt, multiform angles through which one can skewer the wealthy. Many have done it. I'm thinking here of Renoir's The Rules of the Game or, more recently, Bong Joon-Ho's Parasite, among others. But in both of those films, more attention is paid to the wealthy themselves and their various particularities, which are then used as avenues for humor and social criticism. Here, most of the affluent passengers exist as jokes themselves, with next to no time spent digging more deeply into their individual or shared psychologies. One couple is defined by their profession, another by her insistence on getting the crew to go swimming. And then they vanish, unexamined, until they're shown knee-deep in filth.

It is cathartic, undoubtedly. And it's the great payoff to the character-by-character build that Östland executes over a prolonged stretch. It is strange and disgusting and amusing, but I didn't find that the amusement I was deriving from the on-screen action had much to do with the character's social status. "Rich people get sick after eating bad caviar" feels like a layup, but my total lack of attachment to or insight into the wealthy characters left me feeling hollow after the fact. Though beautifully executed and a feat of direction, the humor itself felt more akin to late-90s, early-00s American gross-out comedies than anything more nuanced or profound. One wonders if a smaller scope might've made it more impactful.

Another aspect of the wealthy characters' lack of depth that didn't sit right with me was suffering inflicted upon totally unknown entities to some great comedic effect. There is a character in this film named Therese (Iris Berben) who is disabled: she cannot walk and she cannot speak aside from a single German phrase: "In den Wolken" or, in the clouds. We do not learn anything about her or her husband other than the existence of her disability, yet Östland essentially tortures her for laughs over the course of the film, separating her from her husband and forcing her to exist alone within herself. She struggles and struggles with no real arc or payoff, and the film asks the audience to laugh. Perhaps an earlier version of this script exists in which Therese and her husband are seen discussing their slave trading business or their various sweatshops across Southeast Asia. But in the current version, we know nothing. Much like the rest of Östland's aristocracy, she is a gossamer icon meant to represent something larger without ever earning that designation.

Equally undeserving of any meaningful analysis is The Captain (Woody Harrelson), who appears in only a handful of scenes. He spends much of the cruise holed up in his room, drinking in a bathrobe and listening to Russian music heard through the walls. His one scene of import, the pivotal "Captain's Dinner" where everyone becomes ill, zeroes in on a conversation between him and a Russian oligarch, Dimitry (Zlatko Buric, a standout amongst the cast). Dimitry is a capitalist, The Captain, a communist. Dimistry paraphrases Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher while The Captain recites Marx and Lenin quotes off of his iPhone. They're both buffoons who goofily bond over their ridiculous irreverence and drink themselves silly as the rest of the ship wretches. Their conversation is explicitly about the nature of warring economic ideologies, capitalism vs socialism/communism, relying on real-world references to make their points. It's too overt: a hat on a hat. The endless parade of bodily fluids works well enough as a means of criticizing the rancid behavior of the upper-class. It doesn't feel explicitly necessary to have a drunken Woody Harrelson recite his personal journal about the U.S. government's involvement in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It'd be one thing to incorporate it in a meaningful way, but to utilize it as a soundtrack to a sequence already advocating against the current global state of affairs read as incredibly clunky.

Without going into specifics, individuals leave the boat and form a small society together. It's here that Östland recaptures some of the magic of the first section, focusing on interpersonal relationships and the power dynamics at play in every interaction. Dolly De Leon, who is not seen until this point in the film, excels, almost stealing the movie. As Abigail, a toilet maintenance manager, she and Östland capture a feeling and an attitude that will ring true to anyone who has wanted more power than they've got. The film is worth seeing for the first and third sections alone.

Is it enough to present a meaningful idea on film? What are the circumstances surrounding an idea that make it worth depicting or not? In the current internet landscape, you can't throw a stone without hitting someone who hates the rich and discusses it openly. I'd wager that much of, if not all of, the American audience for this film shares the views it espouses. As evidenced by the reception at the New York Film Festival, it will hit all of their buttons and leave them in gut-busting, tear-inducing laughter. I just wonder if we'll be analyzing the film's themes somewhere down the line, or if audience members will leave affirmed, satisfied, and be done.