Ruben Östlund's Triangle Of Sadness: satire on the high seas

Growing fame will bring increased opportunities – Hollywood, perhaps? – but Östlund will hope it doesn’t bring increased recognition too. New film Triangle Of Sadness takes place mostly on a luxury cruise for a super-rich clientele and to research it he went undercover – or “incognito”, as he puts it – to see his subjects up close. You can’t do that if your face is plastered all over newspapers and magazines.

So what did he make of the one-percenters he brushed up against? “What I found out is that these people are very nice, they just don’t want to pay taxes,” he laughs. “It’s like a five star luxury hotel, a very exclusive one, where the crew is not allowed to say no to the passengers. I found out that [with] some of these people who have been in this world and been treated in this way, an extreme behaviour comes out.”

Extreme behaviour such as demanding the jacuzzi in their suite be filled with champagne. Or, in one case he heard about from an obligingly loose-tongued crew member, with champagne and goldfish. It was at this point the crew in question decided to remove the jacuzzi because it was “provoking bad behaviour”, as Östlund cutely puts it. “So I was really trying [in the film] to go in to what happens to us when we are completely spoiled, when the hierarchies are so strong.”

Enter model and influencer Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and her ineffectual and less successful model boyfriend Carl (British actor Harris Dickinson, last seen in Where The Crawdads Sing). The glamorous couple have been given their berth gratis in return for social media exposure, so she takes selfies with appropriately lush backgrounds and Carl snaps her sunning herself in a bikini or holding a forkful of handmade pasta to her mouth – though in fact she’s gluten intolerant and won’t touch the stuff.

Among the other passengers are a lonely tech billionaire (Henrik Dorsin), a drunken, boisterous, Ronald Reagan-quoting Russian oligarch (Zlatko Burić) who made his fortune cornering the post-Soviet market in manure – “I’m in shit,” he tells people – and an elderly British couple (Oliver Ford Davies and Amanda Walker) who seem kindly enough until the source of their wealth is revealed. They run an arms firm and complain to Yaya and Carl at dinner about the ban on the use of landmines. Very bad for business, apparently.

In one excruciating scene a guest demands a smartly dressed crew member join her in the pool. The terrified woman politely declines, knowing she will be sacked if she does – knowing too that she cannot refuse the request. Such are the dilemmas of those who tend to the needs and whims of the obscenely wealthy. In the end the entire crew is forced to go swimming, even the chef at work in the galley preparing a Michelin star dining experience for the passengers.

“The target is to entertain myself, do things that I think are funny, and raise questions that I think are important,” Östlund explains. “I love when the film is not making it safe and easy for the audience to react. I don’t want them to think: ‘It’s a comedy I can sit back and laugh’. I also want sometimes to go much farther than the audience expects me to do.”

Going much further – in fact going too far entirely and at length – is a trademark of this most mischievous of directors. The Square, a satire of the art world, features several unforgettable scenes. The most notorious involves a bravura turn by stunt actor Terry Notary, who had worked on the Planet Of The Apes remakes and who Östlund found by Googling “actor imitating monkey”. Here’s why: Notary appears at a gala event for museum patrons as a performance artist called Oleg who pretends to be a chimpanzee. It’s cute funny until it isn’t – until Oleg begins to physically assault the guests and they flee the room, bloodied and screaming. Too much? Definitely.

In Triangle Of Sadness Östlund deploys the same kind of wrecking ball, first in a storm which causes an outbreak of projectile vomiting during the captain’s dinner, and second in the shape of the perpetually inebriated captain himself (Woody Harrelson, pictured below on set, having the time of his life in a role written for him). Cue mayhem.

Curzon (Image: Curzon)

Östlund is a fan of the work of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who made the iconic silent film Un Chien Andalou. More relevant to Triangle Of Sadness, perhaps, is Buñuel’s 1962 film The Exterminating Angel, in which a bourgeois dinner party descends into violent anarchy when the guests find themselves unable to leave the room. Does the Swede sit in the same tradition of politically charged Surrealism?

“I didn’t before this movie,” he says, “but when I shot the captain’s dinner I thought if I’m really pushing this vomiting and this absurdity it could almost be a metaphor for the end of Western civilization. So I wanted to go from naturalism to this very extreme thing.”

For Östlund it all comes back to a certain 19th century German philosopher.

“Triangle Of Sadness has a connection to Karl Marx in that he was one of the inventors of sociology,” he explains. “For me that’s a very sympathetic way of looking at our behaviour, showing that it is dependent on where we are positioned in the social and economic structure. So I wanted to flip over the hierarchies and show that if we are brought up in a society where we abuse power, the next person will also abuse power when they end up at the top of the hierarchy.”

And so it goes in the film’s final ‘chapter’, a sort of blackly comic riff on Lord Of The Flies in which a lowly and previously unseen crew member, Filipino ‘toilet manager’ Abigail (Dolly De Leon), comes to the fore. Mostly because she know how to light fires and catch fish, something her cosseted charges are incapable off. The film’s title, by the way, refers to the frown line-susceptible area of forehead between the eyes, a much-favoured place for Botox injections.

Triangle Of Sadness had its glitzy British premiere at the London Film Festival earlier this month. But what should have been another high in a triumphant post-Cannes period for Östlund is tinged with sadness. South African actress Charlbi Dean died suddenly in August aged just 32, possibly as a result of a viral infection exacerbated by a historic car crash which had involved the removal of her spleen. Whatever the cause, the director and the remaining cast members were devastated.

“It almost feels not real today because it happened so quickly, from one day to another she was not there anymore,” he says. “When we are presenting the film now and we are standing there as an ensemble and taking the credit for the film, there is one person missing and it is just really, really sad. At the same time we try to present the film in a way that makes the audiences focus on her performance and pay tribute to her as an actress … I think she had many more roles in her.”

Triangle Of Sadness is released on October 28