Cannes Review: Ruben Ostlund’s ‘Triangle Of Sadness’

Kelly Reichardt has been making minimal Americana since the early 1990s, mostly around the state of Oregon where she lives and mostly about her favored awkward squad: quiet square pegs who don’t quite fit the round holes society provides. In this ongoing quest she has found many collaborators, but none more attuned to her recessive brand of naturalism than Michelle Williams.

“Showing Up” makes its world premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticLizzy Carr (Michelle Williams), the central character of Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” is a sculptor who is finishing up a series of ceramic figures she’ll be presenting in a gallery show. We see her working, throughout the movie, on the small clay statues — all women, each one about a foot tall, some mounted on rods, all with an intentionally rough, patchy surface that may look awkward and unpolished if you’re close up to it, but when you stand back a bit you see the aesthetic elegance of her style. (Giacometti would understand.) She’s making sculptures of female characters who look a bit ghostly in their lack of perfect line, but that’s part of their design (they all appear a little tormented), and that quality is balanced by the delicate surprise colors they’re painted with, which express their inner life.

Afternoon Insiders, Max Goldbart here. Cannes is wrapping and we have the very latest from the Croisette, plus a hell of a lot more in this week’s deep dive. Read on.

Leo Barraclough International Features EditorOn Saturday, film and TV funder Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg celebrated the six films that it funded running in the official program of the Cannes Film Festival.These were Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness,” in Competition, Ali Abbasi’s “Holy Spider,” in Competition, Emily Atef’s “More Than Ever,” in Un Certain Regard, Mia Hansen-Løve’s “Un beau matin,” in Directors’ Fortnight, Sergei Loznitsa’s “The Natural History of Destruction,” in Special Screening, and Mantas Kvedaravicius’ “Mariupolis 2,” in Special Screening.Commenting on the role Medienboard played in funding the films in Cannes, the organization’s chief Kirsten Niehuus said: “Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and other film funds play an important role in sustaining high quality cinema in Europe and in international co-productions around the world.” Speaking about the type of films Medienboard likes to fund, she said: “Not very original but true – we prefer films that bring something original to an audience. That goes for mainstream as well as young talent and arthouse.

had some bleak words about the state of the movies in the first part of a Cannes symposium about the future of cinema. But in part two of that conversation, the “Nightmare Alley” filmmaker had a much more optimistic message and explained why today’s directors can’t be afraid of how the movies are changing.Speaking on a panel with other directors including Rebecca Zlotowski, Abderrahmane Sissako, Abel Ferrara, Lynne Ramsay, Laurent Cantet, Pawel Pawlikowski, Joachim Lafosse and even a surprise appearance from Nicolas Winding Refn, del Toro explained that as filmmakers, we “can’t be shy about the platforms,” referring to the algorithms and new methods that are dictating the way the movies are being made today.

Swedish director Ruben Östlund‘s already won one Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival; in 2017 for “The Square.” And while he’s back in Cannes again this year with “Triangle Of Sadness” to try and win another, he already has his next film in mind, with Woody Harrelson set to star for him again. READ MORE: ‘Triangle Of Sadness’ Review: Ruben Östland’s Falters In This Broad Class Satire [Cannes] In an interview with Variety, Östlund gave details about the new project, including its title and premise.

Naman Ramachandran The late Govindan Aravindan’s 1978 masterpiece “Thamp̄” (“The Circus Tent”) is one of two Indian films at this year’s Cannes Classics selection, alongside Satyajit Ray’s “Pratidwandi” (“The Adversary”) from 1970.“Thamp̄” was painstakingly restored by India’s Film Heritage Foundation (FHF), an organization founded by filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur (“Celluloid Man,” “CzechMate: In Search of Jirí Menzel”) in 2014. Dungarpur facilitated the restoration of Uday Shankar’s landmark film “Kalpana” (1948) by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, the restored version of which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012.

In part deux today of the Cannes Film Festival symposium on cinema, three female filmmakers were represented in You Were Never Really Here‘s Lynne Ramsay and Grand Central‘s Rebecca Zlotowski and French actress/director/scribe Agnes Jaoui, unlike yesterday when it was all men. The festival on social media took a licking for being tone deaf in the wake of yesterday’s panel.

review of the film for TheWrap, Ben Croll wrote that Abbasi with “Holy Spider” turns the murder thriller “upside down, telling a story where the killer’s identify is never in doubt and his intentions are always crystal clear, and where the greatest source of tension comes from wondering whether anyone in power will lift a finger to stop him.”Abbasi wrote “Holy Spider” with Afshin Kamran Bahrami. Sol Bondy and Jacob Jarek produced the film.

Manori Ravindran International Editor[Warning: Spoilers ahead for “Triangle of Sadness”]Dolly de Leon doesn’t get very far in Cannes without being stopped in the street by enthusiastic supporters. The scene-stealing Filipina actor stars in Ruben Östlund’s festival sensation “Triangle of Sadness,” where her every line has so far prompted cheers in press and public screenings alike.De Leon plays Abigail, a toilet manager on a chaotic cruise ship who gets her own back on her bosses and guests when, well, shit hits the fan.

Lise Pedersen The top IEFTA (Intl. Film Talent Assn.) award for docs-in-progress at the Cannes Film Market’s documentary-focused industry sidebar Cannes Docs has gone to “Twice Colonized” by Lin Alluna.The film was developed by the Circle Women Doc Accelerator, a training program for female-identifying documentary filmmakers.The win marks a hat-trick for Circle since they started their partnership with Cannes Docs in 2020: previous IEFTA Docs-in-Progress Award laureates at the industry event include “Beauty of the Beast” by Anna Nemes, produced by Circle 2018 alumna Ágnes Horváth-Szabó, and “Cent’anni” by Circle 2020 alumna Maja Prelog, produced by Rok Biček.“Twice Colonized” tells the story of renowned Inuit lawyer Aaju Peter who has led a lifelong fight for the rights of her people.

Neon has acquired North American rights to Ruben Östlund’s buzzy satire, Triangle of Sadness, following its world premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Rise Films is nearing the end of what has been a monumental month for the London-based production outfit. Last week, HBO Max launched the company’s two-part documentary George Carlin’s American Dream, which chronicles the life and five-decade career of the comedian with Judd Apatow in the director’s seat.

Naman Ramachandran Indian documentary “From the Shadows,” by Miriam Chandy Menacherry (“Lyari Notes”), has been selected for the Breaking Through the Lens initiative at the Cannes Film Market.The initiative connects female and non-binary directors to finance at top-tier film markets.In the documentary, artist Leena Kejriwal relentlessly sprays silhouettes on public walls tagged #missing, activist Hasina Kharbhih accompanies girls rescued from child sex trafficking across international borders, and survivor Samina fights a long and arduous legal battle against her traffickers. Parallel narratives intersect to reveal a sliver of hope when women challenge a powerful trafficking nexus operating in a country where every eight minutes a child goes missing.

In David Cronenberg’s latest genre twister, Crimes of the Future, Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux plays partners who are performance artists, engrossed in performing surgery (largely on the former) for public nightclub spectacle. They’re enthralled with the freedom they can take on each other’s bodies. All of this in a governing society that’s not too fond of it.

Just when his fans may have figured that David Cronenberg had called it a career (he’s now 79 and hadn’t made a feature since the misfired Maps to the Stars in 2014), along comes a film that only the Canadian maestro of the perverse could have created.

There’s a lot of weird fetishes in this world, which we won’t go into, but for David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, the new sex is surgery.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticMost filmmakers who want to unsettle you in a horror movie will reach for a familiar set of tools: slashers, demons, shock cuts, soundtracks that go boom! in the night. But in “Crimes of the Future,” the writer-director David Cronenberg is out to provoke and disturb us with something far more traumatic than mere monsters.Am I talking about the fact that in the distant future where the film is set, human beings grow mysterious new organs in their bodies? Or that having those organs removed through surgery has become, for a creepy rebel aesthete named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a species of performance art? Or that people no longer experience physical pain, and will therefore stand in the street late at night cutting each other for cheap thrills, as if they were shooting heroin in a back alley? Or that surgery itself, as someone puts it, has become “the new sex”? If you see “Crimes of the Future,” you’ll witness all of these outrages, and a few more besides.

“Crimes of the Future” will be David Cronenberg’s final film — never believe a director who says they’re quitting — but it definitely feels like a closing argument, one that both reaffirms the filmmaker’s favorite themes and stylistic choices while also reflecting a shift in his point of view.We’ve been here before with Cronenberg; his 1999 “Existenz” also had the feel of a greatest-hits collection. But for audiences starved for brash choices from one of the cinema’s boldest living provocateurs, even a rehash seems fresher than corporate-assembled, focus-group-approved content.Should this be the Canadian auteur’s final feature, he won’t be leaving on a high note: “Crimes of the Future” won’t be remembered alongside masterpieces like “Dead Ringers,” “The Fly,” “The Brood,” or “Crash.” Nonetheless, as a writer-director, Cronenberg continues to plumb his obsessions, both narrative and visual, and he brings enough energy and bravado to the mix to make this an oft-told story that he’s recounting as though for the first time.Borrowing the title (but little else) from one of his earliest films, “Crimes of the Future” takes place in a near-future dystopia where pain has become a thing of the past and surgery is both a hot trend and the source of a new brand of performance art.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentAfter winning the Palme d’Or with “The Square,” Ruben Östlund has shocked Cannes audiences again with “Triangle of Sadness,” an equally provocative social satire starring Woody Harrelson as a rabid Marxist who is the captain of a cruise for the super-rich. “Triangle of Sadness” is so far the most buzzed-about movie in competition and a domestic deal believed to be in the $8 million arena is currently being negotiated. Östlund spoke to Variety about his original way of developing scripts and casting, and the sociological aspects of both “Triangle of Sadness” and his next project “The Entertainment System Is Down,” which he said will star Harrelson as the “captain of an airplane.”It’s now 2 hours and 22 minutes.

Viola Davis brought guests at Kering’s annual Women in Motion dinner in Cannes to their feet on Sunday with a rousing speech acknowledging her roots and personal journey to Hollywood.“As much as I love Alexander McQueen — and I love Alexander McQueen — and the fabulous makeup,” said Davis, “I am always, always so moved when people tell me my work or my life meant something to them. But just know who I am at the end of the day is: I don’t want to leave something for people — I want to leave something in people.”Davis was speaking on stage at Kering’s annual dinner at the Cannes Film Festival, where she was the night’s honoree.

Forbes). “I know we are human beings and that we are very complicated, and the power of art is that it knows no color. Because human beings, when they sit and watch art they want to feel less alone.

Clayton Davis The best movie involving a boat since “Titanic” with the best vomiting sequence since “Team America: World Police,”  Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness” is an energetic and wacky examination of class, gender norms and culture, woven into a dynamite script. After debuting at Cannes, Östlund’s English-language debut will finally introduce the Swedish writer and director to more mainstream American audiences, and possibly even Oscar voters.The film tells the story of Carl (Harris Dickenson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), two fashion models and a celebrity couple who in three narrative chapters explore their roles in each other’s lives — following a dinner date, a luxury cruise and a shocking x-factor that presents an interesting turn of events.

review, Nicholas Barber wrote that “Corsage” stylistically resembles the dreamy Kristen Stewart film “Spencer.” “Whenever the film seems to be settling into an atmospheric but conventionally good-looking period piece, Kreutzer throws in an amusing and jarring reminder of the modern world, as if Elisabeth were breaking out of her allotted role by time-traveling, momentarily, to the present day,” Barber wrote. “Corsage” follows Elisabeth around her 40th birthday at a time when her role in the empire is slowly becoming more performative and has to fight to maintain her public image by lacing her corset ever tighter and tighter.

Valeria Bruni Tedeschi’s “Forever Young” is a fictionalised account of her time at Les Amandiers, a prestigious acting school in Nanterre on the outskirts of Paris. As well as drawing on her own memories of student-dom in the mid-1980s, she and her co-writers, Noémie Nvovsky and Agnes De Sacy, interviewed other people who studied alongside her, and so their tragedy-tinged comedy drama, which is in Competition at Cannes, should have all the unruly specificity of real life.

Timing can be cruel. Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli’s second feature, Sick Of Myself, has the misfortune to arrive in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section in the slipstream of Ruben Östlund’s divisive but funny competition title Triangle of Sadness; the latter being a broader, sillier but much more brutal dissection of class and culture. Sick Of Myself also has to compete with the unexpected longevity of fellow countryman Joachim Trier’s hit The Worst Person In The World, which last year went from the Cannes competition all the way to the Oscars.

Lise Pedersen Scandinavia is bringing talent old and new to the Cannes Film Market’s Cannes Docs sidebar this year, with a showcase of five feature length films-in-the-making pitched as part of the Scandinavian Showcase on Saturday.“Children of the Lowest Heaven”From Denmark, internationally acclaimed writer-director Birgitte Stærmose Mortensen (“Darling,” “Room 304”), who has been working on mini-series for HBO, Starz and Netflix for the past five years (“Industry” season 2, “The Spanish Princess,” “In From the Cold” and “The English Game”), presented “Children of the Lowest Heaven” (“Ønskeliv”), a hybrid doc set in Kosovo.Inspired by her short “Out of Love” (2009), about a group of children living in poverty in post-war Pristina, it picks up where she left off with the characters, who are now young adults, still fighting to survive in one of Europe’s poorest nations. It’s about the long-term effects of war, and what it means to live a life in poverty.

Rolling applause, and lots of it, greeted Ruben Östlund and the cast of Triangle Of Sadness as they entered the Cannes press conference this morning.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentWoody Harrelson will reteam with “Triangle of Sadness” director Ruben Östlund for his next film “The Entertainment System is Down.” The Oscar-nominee broke the news during the press conference for “Triangle of Sadness” at Cannes on Monday, the morning after the movie world premiered in competition.In “Triangle of Sadness,” Harrelson plays a rabid Marxist who is the captain of a cruise for the super-rich. The yacht sinks, leaving survivors, including a fashion model celebrity couple, marooned on an island.

After his 2017 art-world satire “The Square” scored the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Swedish provocateur Ruben Östlund swaggers back to competition with “Triangle of Sadness,” a mixed-bag of social commentary and gross-out comedy that could only come from a filmmaker with a secured reputation and zero f—s to give. Taking aim at the 1% and shouting “Eat the rich!” with the anger of a sea storm and the subtlety of an exploding toilet, the film is both over-long and under-stuffed, but it nevertheless left Cannes’ notoriously tough crowd doubled over in laughter.Running just under two-and-a-half hours and split up into three chapters, the film lifts as much from Noam Chomsky as from John Waters as it hoses down beauty standards and luxury culture with gallons of projectile vomit.

Woody Harrelson‘s new movie Triangle of Sadness, which is billed as a social satire, got a warm reception during its premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

Zack Sharf SPOILER ALERT: Minor plot points for Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness” are discussed below.Cannes attendees waiting for David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” to give the festival a stomach-churning shock got an electrifying surprise with the world premiere of Ruben Östlund’s latest social satire, “Triangle of Sadness.” The movie earned an uproarious eight-minute standing ovation after a lively screening that found the audience at Cannes’ Palais theater shrieking in horror and delight.“Triangle of Sadness” stars “Beach Rats” and “The Kingsman” actor Harris Dickinson as an aspiring model who gets the chance to vacation aboard a luxury yacht after his influencer girlfriend wins them a free trip. Woody Harrelson plays the yacht’s alcoholic captain.

It’s one of modern life’s most beguiling paradoxes that social media influencers are, of course, the scum of the earth, and yet the pop culture skewering them always plays so uncharitably that a viewer feels compelled to defend the indefensible. Ruben Östlund comes out swinging against Instagrammers in the first third of his new film “Triangle of Sadness,” which joins a pair of logged-on models after a casting-call prologue introducing us to the chiseled Carl (Harris Dickinson, cementing his place in the next generation of movie stars).

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThe closer you look at the subject of beauty, the uglier it appears. Meanwhile, wealth is obscene from practically every angle. Irreverent Swedish satirist Ruben Östlund gets right up in there, probing the pores of the elitist worlds of supermodels and the mega-rich in “Triangle of Sadness,” which takes its name from a fashion-world term for the deep-V crease that appears between one’s eyebrows with stress or age.

Cannes Film Festival is making efforts to diversify beyond the cavalcade of many of the same male auteurs. Instead, there will be a record number of women directors in competition.Now the bad news.