How do you include a 15-minute vomit scene in a movie, without it feeling gratuitous? You might think it’s impossible, but Swedish director Ruben Ostlund not only achieved it in Triangle of Sadness, he leaves the audience gleefully craving more.
The Cannes Film Festival is renowned for enthusiastic audience responses, and anything less than a five-minute standing ovation is considered a slap in the face.
Triangle of Sadness earned a full eight minutes of rapturous applause at Cannes last year, on its way to winning the coveted Palme d’Or as the deserving best movie at the festival.
The result continued Ostlund’s stunning run of success at the event, with the director having previously won Cannes’ top gong in 2017 for The Square, and, in 2014, he also won the jury prize in the Un Certain Regard category for Force Majeure.
It was only a matter of time before an English-language feature beckoned, and the Swede enlisted Hollywood legend Woody Harrelson to head the cast of his latest savage satire, which takes aim at the super rich, gender roles, influencer culture and the fashion industry.
Sounds like a scattergun approach, to be sure, and in lesser hands it could easily dilute the impact of the film, but Ostlund manages to skewer each of his targets with brutal precision.
The film opens with a casting call for male models, in which the film’s lead, English actor Harris Dickinson (The King’s Man), immediately stands out as Carl, who looks the part but doesn’t quite fit into the vacuous world of high fashion.
Maybe you’re right, maybe it has hijacked the film a little bit
It’s in this opening stanza that we get an informative title drop, and learn “triangle of sadness” is actually a cosmetic surgeon’s term for the patch of skin between the eyebrows and above the nose, which becomes furrowed when we’re upset.
The action soon switches to an intimate dinner scene in a fancy restaurant, where we see Carl and his self-obsessed model girlfriend, Yaya (played by South African actor Charlbi Dean), argue over the bill.
It’s an early indication gender roles are in the crosshairs, but Ostlund quickly changes tack and moves the young couple to an exclusive cruise for the obscenely rich, where they’ve been given free tickets as social media influencers.
On the cruise we’re introduced to Harrelson’s scene-stealing character, a grizzled (and regularly sozzled) skipper, who gives zero you-know-whats.
So world-weary is this skipper, that he relishes the cruise descending into chaos when a Captain’s dinner with the aforementioned uber rich is scuppered by rough weather and the associated chronic seasickness.
Cue: the 15-minute vomit sequence.
So simple in its ability to tear down the social hierarchy that exists around us, the scene was devilishly hard to produce.
“It was actually very complicated for me to shoot that scene because I’m a director that likes to be in control,” Ostlund tells The West Australian over a Zoom call.
“We had built the dining room corridor and a couple of the cabins on a gimbal that we could drop 20 degrees; basically, so much so the furniture started sliding.
“And we were almost 60 people on this gimbal at the same time, the crew and the actors and everything, and we were shooting for eight hours a day.
“And when the crew is standing on a rocking gimbal for eight hours, they actually get seasick themselves, I got seasick, so, I didn’t enjoy the shooting.”
As hard as it was to shoot the scene, the real challenge came after the production wrapped.
“It actually took half a year for me to edit that scene; to make it work in the way that I wanted, so it was a very complicated thing to do,” the director says.
Ostlund pauses for a moment when asked if he thinks this one scene has hijacked the discourse around his stunningly good satire.
“Maybe you’re right, maybe it has hijacked the film a little bit,” he admits.
“I wanted actually to speak to the humanistic side of the audience, that even though we have this feeling that we are getting revenge on the super rich, when we see them suffer, that actually, at a certain point, we realise they’ve had enough and they are just human beings.”
The funny thing, though, is audiences don’t get enough of the suffering and, if anything, want even more because it satisfies our deep-seated “eat the rich” desire.
The huge success of the film owes a lot to the quality of the performances of Dickinson and Dean, which makes it all bittersweet for Ostlund because the 32-year-old South African died suddenly of bacterial sepsis just months after Cannes.
“We have dedicated many screenings to her that have been a way to honour her family and pay respect for what they are going through, and then also make the audience have a closer look at her performance,” Ostlund says.
“For me, in many ways, the film is an ensemble movie, and all of the actors were really like team players . . . and now, all of a sudden, it’s like one of the team players is missing.”
There are many reasons to seek out Triangle of Sadness — its biting satire, the nuanced social commentary and the genuine humour, for starters — but watching this film for Dean’s brilliant performance is as good as any of them.
