Triangle Of Sadness (2022) Breaking news. Rich people suck. And anything bad that befalls those pampered, arrogant bastards and bitches can't happen soon enough......
What? You've heard this news before? Really?
Oh wait....come to think of it....this may not be the first movie I've ever seen where the working stiffs turn the tables on all the rich, entitled, spoiled pricks who tyrannize and humiliate them.....
Now that I recall, the Brits, bless their cheeky, subtle little hearts, tackled this topic in 1957's "The Admirable Chrichton", about a wealthy family ruled over by their butler after they're all marooned on a tropical island -( see the BQ post of 4/2/21)
And let's not forget art-house icon Lina Wertmuller, who shook the cinema world to its very foundations with her 1974 "Swept Away".....where another remote island served as a oopsie-daisy reversal of fortune locale - for a hot-tempered rich diva and the equally volcanic deckhand she's stranded with.
Oops, I almost forgot about the much awarded 2019 Korean "Parasite", where a poor family conspires to literally infiltrate themselves into an uppercrust household....
But at long last a new generation of filmmakers now adds something that's been sorely missed from class struggle movies........social media influencers, rivers of cascading vomit and toilets overflowing with explosive diarrhea....
"Triangle Of Sadness", given its separate self-contained chapters and 2 and a half hour running time, has far loftier ambitions and more up-to-date targets than either of those films.
We start out with pair of young sculpted, vacuous fashion model influencers (Harris Dickinson, Charibi Dean), squabbling their way through an up-and-down relationship. When not on their eternal quest for more instagram clicks and followers, they bicker incessantly over gender identity issues like who should pick up the check when they dine out.
In pursuit of more hot social media posts, these self-absorbed infants sign up a luxury cruise aboard a hotel-sized super-yacht, along with a bunch of the world's wealthiest, most imperious assholes.
What could possibly go wrong? Heh, heh, heh, heh............
Which brings us the film's most notorious, outrageous and, whether you admit it or not, riotously funny middle section.....
At dinner, in the midst of a ship-tossing storm, the captain, a genial drunkard (Woody Harrelson) safely feasts on a burger and fries. Everyone else consumes the chef's barely cooked seafood, spoiled when a capricious passenger ordered the entire staff away from their tasks to cavort on the water slide.
What follows is a spectacular carnival of nausea as the passengers projectile vomit while they navigate the funhouse tilting of the storm stricken boat. And the storm clears just in time for the ship to encounter even bigger disasters in the morning.......
At long last the filmmakers (and what's left of the cast) arrive where we knew they'd end up to lay out their main thesis.......the remote deserted island, where the leisure class falls at the mercy of the minimum wage workhorse they used to demean.
In this case the two influencer cutie pies and a few surviving billionaires become utterly dependent on the enforced matriarchy of the ship's maid (Dolly De Leon), the only one capable of hunting and cooking food for them. By this time, you start to realize how overlong, obvious and overbearing this film has become, waving its satirical irony around like a flag.
Not a bad ironic finale twist, but the film quickly ruins it with its last bit of stupid, film-festival culture vulture ambivalence. When the credits roll, I realized I could've gotten the entire gist of this film just watching the shipboard vomitorium sequence.....2 stars (**)......and I doubt anyone's holding their breath waiting for this to snag a Best Picture Oscar.....
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