Home » «Triangle of Sadness», a cutting satire shakes up the Cannes competition

«Triangle of Sadness», a cutting satire shakes up the Cannes competition

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«Triangle of Sadness», a cutting satire shakes up the Cannes competition

The films by Ruben Östlund, the Swedish director who had won (somewhat generously) the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival with “The Square”, never leave indifferent, and his new work “Triangle of Sadness” is no exception. .

The protagonist of the film is a couple of models invited to take part in a luxury cruise together with a bizarre group of characters. It all sounds pleasant at first, but a catastrophic event will turn the journey into a nightmare adventure, where every hierarchy will end up being turned upside down. what with the world of fashion and, above all, of influencers, inserted not by chance in a context in which they are surrounded by figures who have made money in the most disparate ways and not always in a totally clean way (emblematic the case of an elderly couple became rich thanks to the creation of hand grenades) .Divided into three chapters, the film opens with a long conversation between the two protagonists about a bill to pay, continues with the remarkable part aboard the super yacht and ends on a island where the roles will suddenly reverse.

An increasingly personal style

Although possible reference models can be cited (an example can be Luis Buñuel for his ability to highlight the cynicism of certain social classes), Östlund has a style that is now very personal, controversial and questionable, but also able to effectively read the With very direct messages, the Swedish director describes a world adrift in which contact with reality is gradually lost: it is not only a reasoning about what is “instagrammable” that dominates the market, but about a human tendency to always want to take advantage of the situation, even to the detriment of the people closest to us. Despite a considerable duration (about 2h30m), the proposed satire is so sharp and intelligent as not to weigh the long minutes. With this film, Östlund could take home an award again this year.

Three Thousand Years of Longing

Out of competition was presented “Three Thousand Years of Longing”, a film by George Miller who returns behind the camera (and on the Croisette) seven years after “Mad Max: Fury Road”. At the center of the narrative is Alithea, an English-speaking literary woman who is in Istanbul to attend an important conference. Intrigued by an artifact found in a shop, the woman takes it to the hotel and by rubbing it she will have a curious surprise: from that object comes a Genius willing to fulfill three of her wishes. “Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp”, Miller has especially adapted the novel “The Genius in the Nightingale’s Eye” by AS Byatt to tell this excessively gooey and sugary sentimental story, which soon ends up being indigestible. shows the rope with some special effects of dubious taste and a narrative seal that soon proves too fragile: in a verbose way, the Genius begins to tell Alithea his long history and the various vicissitudes that forced him to be imprisoned several times .

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Miller focuses on a particularly refined aesthetic that seems to mix David LaChapelle with the style of Tarsem, director of a film similar from the visual point of view as “The Fall”: the images are extremely colorful and flashy, but often ends in themselves and unable to offer the right symbolic value to the formal apparatus staged. The two main actors, Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba, are probably the best element of the film but not even they manage to raise the fortunes of an operation that it would have deserved a much greater cinematic breath.

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