By Laurence Lerman / New York City
With his fifth feature film, 2022’s Triangle of Sadness, Swedish filmmaker Ruben Östlund, one of the great provocateurs of recent European cinema, has unofficially “arrived’ on U.S. shores. His first English language effort has garnered a nomination for Best Film at the 2023 Academy Awards.
Triangle of Sadness has already snagged a bunch of notable nominations from the Golden Globes, the BAFTA Awards, the Critics’ Choice Awards, France’s César Awards and the National Society of Film Critics. And that in addition to winning the coveted Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. That’s Östlund’s second Palme d’Or from Cannes, following his victory with 2017’s The Square.
The European cinema community appears to like what the auteur puts on the screen.
Even at 48, Östlund is clearly an enfant terrible who brings a lot to the table beyond being a declared fan of such provocative filmmakers and enfants as Luis Buñuel, R.W. Fassbinder and Jean Cocteau (the author of the 1929 novel Les Enfants Terribles, no less, which was made into a film in 1950 by France’s Jean-Pierre Melville).
Categorize Östlund’s films as the cinema of discomfort, as all of them unnervingly or in a roundabout way take aim at bourgeois pretensions and social mores and civility. Upper-class society doesn’t fare well in Östlund’s films, be they a Stockholm museum art curator, his institution’s wealthy patrons and a shallow art world (The Square) or a husband who puts his own life before his family’s during an avalanche while on holiday in the French Alps (2014’s Force Majeure, which was remade in Hollywood as 2020’s Downhill with Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus).
And then there’s his latest film, Triangle of Sadness, a pitch-black comedy that follows the passengers and crew members while they cruise on a superyacht, and the disparity between them. As time reveals, the differences in their beauty, social rank and wealth really don’t mean all that much after the ship capsizes and the survivors are stranded on a deserted island—the only person who knows how to start a fire or catch fish is the ship’s “toilet manager.”
“There’s a certain kind of extreme behavior that comes from passengers on a yacht that I’ve never heard about anywhere else,” Östlund offered in an interview on the German website nochnfilm.com in October. “They are like five-star hotels with very “professional” service all the time. I did a trip on one of these kind of yachts as research for the film.”
While I’m sure I can come with a number of more difficult research trips, Östlund’s voyage was probably an informative one. That can be witnessed in a scene where a millionaire passenger insists that everyone in the crew strip down and go for a swim. Or when a gorgeous “influencer” model (South African star-in-the-making Charlbi Dean, who sadly died last August at 32 of bacterial sepsis) who admits she is in a relationship with fellow model Carl for the engagement it earns them on social media. That is sure to help in her quest to become a trophy wife.
Or even when the ship’s drunken captain (an inspired Woody Harrelson) and a Russian oligarch (Zlatko Burić) debate the virtues of capitalism versus communism as the ship goes down and passengers begin to vomit from both food poisoning and the yacht’s violent pitching.
As for Triangle of Sadness’s Oscar nomination (one of three, which also include two more for Östlund’s direction and screenplay), the writer/director is naturally thrilled at the attention that the movie itself is receiving.
“For me, the great thing with these awards is that they give attention to the film’s content. And I mean, getting a nomination also shows people are interested in this kind of film and are interested in the problematic situations that we are dealing with,” he said in an interview with the online film industry newsite Deadline. “I think one thing that is specific for human beings is that we are very interested in equality, and I’m happy that we get attention for that.”
His reaction was markedly better than that following the announcement of the 2014 Oscar nominations. Back then, Östlund was so confident that he would pick up a Best Foreign Language Film nod for the critically lauded Force Majeure that he filmed himself alongside co-producer Erik Hemmendorff as they watched the nominations live from the Trump Hotel in New York City in 2015.
When Force Majeure's name wasn’t mentioned, Östlund disconsolately walked off-screen as Hemmendorff muttered, “We’re dead. Fuck.”
And in the background, an agonized-sounding Östlund could be heard ranting. I couldn’t discern what exactly he was saying, but it was probably in Swedish, so I wouldn’t have been able to translate it, anyway. A clip of the meltdown can be found on YouTube.
And speaking of the indispensable online video-sharing platform, Östlund professes to be a big fan of YouTube. Huge, in fact.
“I want to be as good as the kids on YouTube when describing a human being—it’s the best way of using moving images on the Internet,” he declared in his interview with nochnfilm.com.
“Directors have to produce better images than we can find on YouTube. That’s how high we should aim!
Sounds like an enfant terrible to me!
Laurence Lerman is a film journalist, former editor of Video Business--Variety's DVD trade publication--and husband to The Insider's own Gwen Cooper. Over the course of his career he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major director working today, including Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Kathryn Bigelow, Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Spike Lee, and Werner Herzog, among numerous others. Once James Cameron specifically requested an interview with Laurence by name, which his wife still likes to brag about. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com.