By Yun-hua Chen.
When historians talk about [the fall of the Roman Empire], it was a very slow process at the end of which Rome is not the center of Europe or the center of the world anymore. Slowly power is shifting and going somewhere else, so the end of capitalism will not be like a Hollywood movie.”
With Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund, the director of Force Majeure (2014) and The Square (2017), once again exposed the upper-middle class, and the art and fashion circle – the world of glamour and wealth that Östlund closely observes with unparalleled deep insights. With the title “triangle of sadness” meaning glabellar lines, the film starts with a sequence of model casting, during which the logic behind the fashion industry that self-justifies inhumanly harsh judgment of physical beauty is laid bare. It then zooms in to an over-the-hill model Carl (Harris Dickinson) and his supermodel girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean). Their fiery argument over a dinner bill, both philosophically gender-themed and childishly ego-driven, is a prelude to the film’s ambitious scope that covers a full spectrum of power struggle. When the charismatic couple is invited to board a luxury cruise as influencers, they enter a confined space with brutal wealth divide in microcosm; the ultra-rich and working-class crew member are literally in the same boat. When they are marooned on an island together, it is like a safe space for social experiments; power relations are reversed unexpectedly, with money becoming worthless but beauty to be exchanged for food.
In Triangle of Sadness, his first English-language film, Ruben Östlund seems even more sure-handed and unflinching. His scope is widened and perspective more global, all while using farces in a blunter manner to unfold the absurdity of reality. In the same vein as The Square, he lays out beauty in its most luxurious and flamboyant form, and then mercilessly uncovers ugliness beneath beauty, and moral decadence beneath hypocritical façade. In our world where beauty functions as a currency and all things can be purchased, Östlund’s films question the ambiguity and fragility of all currencies, our blind obsession with them, and their destructive power. A brilliant study of human behavior in a well delineated space and milieu, Triangle of Sadness is provocative, hilarious, and thought-provoking, a film that is both entertaining and intellectually tantalizing.
At the Sarajevo Film Festival, where Ruben Östlund received Honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award and opened the festival with Triangle of Sadness, he talked with Film International about his dinner scenes, ugliness beneath beauty, the shipwreck, the casting process, and more.
In all your dinner scenes, there is always something wrong. What is your beef with dinner?
I know. At dinners there is always something that goes wrong, right? I am interested in the etiquettes surrounding dinners, and especially when it comes to nice dinners, fine dining and so on. I have a huge problem with fine dining. When it comes to etiquettes and the expected ways of how we should eat and so on, it is always fun to challenge dinner guests in these situations. Then the fall is higher if you start behaving in a non-expected way.
At the same time, this is very much your milieu, right? The film industry, the art scene, beauty industry…. Do you see your films as being self-mocking in a way?
Yes, it would be strange if I made films about how nice the upper middle class is, right? And how good we are. That would feel strange, I think. I think my films are trying to provoke questions for myself, or maybe there are scenes that are originated from situations that I experienced or someone else told me about, which made me think about certain kinds of questions. This is the sort of “core content” that I want to use when I am writing a script. So, it is really cornering myself and making me ask questions to myself, but I don’t really understand when people say “mocking” because it’s fiction. So, I am not using any real people. For me it is a completely different thing to do fictional films when you are actually being harsh towards the characters, compared to the way that news media is constantly exploiting people. And there we don’t talk about mocking, so why don’t we accuse them of mocking real human beings? And, also, as I said many times, I consider the set-up and the scenes that many characters in my films are dealing with almost as a sociological experiment. If you look at sociology, it’s so great because it’s a way of trying to explain why we behave the way we behave. We don’t point fingers at individuals when we deal with sociology. There we try to point fingers at the contexts.
A lot of filmmakers look for beauty in ugliness, and I feel that you are doing the opposite by looking for ugliness in beauty. What is your take on beauty as a concept?
This is a difficult discussion. It is hard to say what beauty is as it is something that is connected to time. I mean, the concept of beauty, if you look at human beings, and if you look at interior design or places, it is changing all the time. And then maybe there is something that is actual “beauty” that relates to us as human beings, and beauty like symmetrical faces. And we would be like, wow, it’s a great way of reproducing them. In the film, Triangle of Sadness, I was also interested in beauty because it is scary, because beauty sets hierarchies when we are in a social context. A beautiful person is changing the dynamics of the room when they come in. It’s also interesting because beauty can fade away. They could come in as beautiful people and as soon as that person starts to talk or socialize, you start to think that maybe it is not at all what I projected on that person. I heard something very interesting about a person that was brought up in East Berlin. The interesting experience he had was that after the wall came down, he came to West Berlin and for the first time he saw big advertisements for perfume, and it was a beautiful woman lying there with a perfume bottle. He felt immediately that, in order to get access to her, it’s connected with money, so that I can buy my position next to her. For him, what happened is that his sexuality died. He didn’t feel any sexuality. It takes away a part of his sexual needs.
In Triangle of Sadness there is lengthy discussion about communism and capitalism. Do you feel that we are having less opportunities for that kind of conversation nowadays because the line is so much more blurred?
I was interested in it because in the 80s when I was brought up, I started to be aware of different ways through which the world was portrayed, I was very much focusing on the Western and the Eastern Blocs, and socialism, liberalism, and capitalism. My mother was turning to communists during the 60s and is still one of few people that calls themselves communist. We had constant political discussions at home. What I feel about these political discussions is that it is almost like two football teams. Are you cheering for the Eastern Bloc or are you cheering for the Western Bloc? Quite soon you realize that it is a very strange way to approach politics and how we should run society, and it’s strange if the socialists cannot admit the advantages that come with capitalism; there are a lot of advantages with a free market. And then the liberalists and capitalists also must understand that socialism is something that can actually be good for a society, and unregulated capitalism can be really really bad for a society. But when you listen to political discussion today, it is about defending your football team rather than what kind of a society we should create. I like the book that the Russian oligarch in the film is reading in the film, Utopia for Realists by Rutger Bregman. I think that book is very interesting when it comes to looking at what kind of ideology we should have when we are running a society. What kind of patterns we are trapped in, and he is talking a lot about a universal basic income.
In Triangle of Sadness, it took a shipwreck for the power relationship to be reversed. I was wondering if you feel that we are heading towards a shipwreck in the volatile world politics….
I don’t think so, actually. I think it would go so slowly that we would hardly see it. Of course in the media we feel that catastrophes are happening every day, and climate change is here and blablabla, which maybe is the case and maybe more powerful than we understand. But when a civilization is breaking down or falling, it actually goes quite slow. For example, the fall of the Roman Empire. When historians talk about that, it was a very slow process at the end of which Rome is not the center of Europe or the center of the world anymore. Slowly power is shifting and going somewhere else, so the end of capitalism will not be like a Hollywood movie.
Was it fun to shoot the shipwreck part of the film?
It was fun, but it was also very hard because I didn’t want to go into the direction of survival movies. I didn’t want to focus on how they try to find water and how hard it is to make fire. As soon as I started to shoot in that environment, many of those images were very close to Survivor the TV soap; they would remind you of this kind of images. And I wanted to stay away from that. So, that was definitely a challenge. For me, I have been interested in going into a kind of an advanced economic and social structure that is in the art world and that is in the fashion world, and then when you come to something as simple as a deserted island, then it’s more black and white. It’s about survival of the fittest. It’s about whether we get fish today, and it’s about I am hungry. So, in this environment there is less fragmented information that I can put in.
How was the casting process? It’s a very interesting international cast, including Dolly de Leon, the Philippines actress who worked in Lav Diaz’ film.
We did a lot of casting, and I like doing casting. Very often I participate in casting processes myself because I learn a lot about the script, and I learn a lot about how to play different roles. I like playing these different roles myself when I was doing improvisation sessions. And then we did casting all over the world basically, in Philippines, in Manila. We also did it in Berlin, LA, Paris, London etc. I am quite open when it comes to who should play these different characters. Of course I wanted someone from Philippines to play the role of Abigail because there are so many Filipinos that are working for the cruise ships. They are very often not well paid or at least much less paid compared to other crew members. So, we went to Manila and did casting sessions there. We were actually trying out the scene when Abigail takes the power over the group. And she just had a very direct, honest, and true way of dealing with these different set-ups that we did during improvisation rounds. I think she is definitely getting a lot of attention after people see the film, and she is definitely worth that.
Yun-hua Chen is an independent film scholar. Her work has been published in Film International, Journal of Chinese Cinema, and Directory of World Cinema. Her monograph on mosaic space and mosaic auteurs was published by Neofelis Verlag, and she has contributed to the edited volume Greek Film Noir (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).