Triangle of Sadness (2022, Ruben Östlund) (Patreon)

50/100

Got a mild kick out of part one, which really burrows into a relationship's petty power dynamics; among other things, Carl and Yaya's argument reveals, with deft precision, the incongruity in our perception of passively noxious behavior (pretending not to notice that the check arrived) and actively noxious behavior (turning that lapse into a federal case, filing motion upon motion upon motion even after the defendant pleads guilty). Östlund excels at wringing comedy out of interpersonal ugliness, and Triangle peaks early with an expertly timed shouting match repeatedly punctuated by closing elevator doors. Harris Dickinson, who didn't particularly impress me in Beach Rats, makes Carl at once relatable and repellent in his obsessive need to be right, and Charlbi Dean (R.I.P.) matches him with maddening detachment. Turns out the film isn't really about this couple, however, and part two's shift to ludicrously blunt anti-capitalist satire aboard a luxury yacht saw my mouth gradually form the dreaded Line Segment of Grim Resignation. Part of that's just sensibility—I'm someone who'd much rather watch Johnny Knoxville attempt to hide from a bull via trompe l'œil than watch Steve-O take a bungee ride in a porta-potty, so you're not gonna win me over with lots of vomiting and overflowing toilets. Mostly, though, these targets are just too easy: wealthy grenade manufacturers complaining that the U.N.'s ban on land mines killed a major revenue stream; Woody Harrelson's captain googling Marxist quotations on his smartphone; Yaya posing for Instagram photos with a forkful of pasta she's not going to eat; etc. And then part three is just schematic, sub-Buñuelian class turnabout, neither insightful enough about what happens when basic survival skills become the most valuable currency (while physical hotness remains #2 with a bullet) nor amusing enough to compensate for that lack of insight. There's an implausible twist ending of sorts, and it's no credit to the film that as soon as this discovery is made, we know exactly what's about to happen. (Östlund tries to complicate things with an ambiguous final shot—more or less the same move Henry Fool makes, actually—but I didn't bite.) Having much preferred this guy's two features that didn't win the Palme d'Or* to his two features that did, I'll henceforth get excited only when Cannes juries ignore his work entirely.

* Admittedly because one was in the Fortnight and the other in UCR. Play would never have beaten Tree of Life, but I can imagine Force Majeure taking the prize instead of Winter Sleep; we were all complaining that it wasn't in Competition.