This year’s 10th and final Oscar nominee to arrive in cinemas is Triangle of Sadness.
There’s been a recent run on satirical films attacking the so-called One Percent. These are the ultra-rich, the ultra-privileged and pretentious - all, you’d think, pretty easy targets.
Last year’s The Menu, for instance, sneered at ridiculously expensive and exclusive restaurants, while 2017’s The Square dared to suggest that, in the high-end art world, the emperor may be a little under-dressed. Goodness!
Photo: Platform Production
The Square was the work of Swedish director Ruben Östlund, and it may not surprise you to learn he picked up the Palme D’Or at Cannes that year for it. Or that he did it again last year with a film called Triangle of Sadness.
This one tackles wealth and privilege head on. Again.
Triangle of Sadness isn’t so much a three-act film as three separate films with many of the same characters.
The first act is essentially an argument between two supermodels called Carl and Yaya. They’re rich because they’re good looking.
Act II takes Carl and Yaya onto a super-yacht. They got free tickets because Yaya is a famous influencer.
The other idle rich on board include Russian oligarchs, tech billionaires and a loveable old English arms-dealer and his wife called Winston and Clementine – get it?
Also in Act II – and in fact the only two good things on the yacht or in the movie – are the captain, amusingly a deeply committed Communist (I say “amusingly”…) and Abigail, who’s in charge of the toilets.
The Captain is played by that perennial good sport Woody Harrelson.
Abigail is played by Phillipino star Dolly de Leon and, unlike Woody, will come into her own in the third act.
This follows an unnecessarily gross banquet scene - the phrase “mal de mer” tells you all you need to know – in which a small selection of guests and crew, including Carl and Yaya, are cast adrift on a desert island. Who will survive?
Triangle of Sadness not only won big at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, it’s up for no fewer than three Oscars this year, including Best Film.
So, you’d expect a little more to it than this.
The film only really picks up steam in the last act, where the over-privileged have no idea how to survive. Not a Boy Scout or Girl Guide among them, it seems – apart from one.
Yes, step up Abigail the toilet manager – is that an actual thing? – to prove that the least likely member of the team can also be the Most Valuable Player.
Theatrical historians among you may be raising your hands at this stage and saying “This sounds suspiciously like that antique stage play The Admirable Crichton.”
Which of course it does – J M Barrie’s cautionary tale of the rich and useless being saved by their butler on a similar desert island.
And I’m not sure Triangle of Sadness adds much more to this, or indeed adds up to anything much.
I’m sure everyone on this film felt they were doing God’s work, satirizing the social attitudes of the undeserving rich. But it’s unlikely the One Percent will sustain more than a couple of glancing blows by the end of it.
