Crusin' for Prosecco

 "Triangle of Sadness” film by Rueben Ostland, 2022

This 'black comedy' is a film that might remind you of others. It got a standing “O” at Cannes and the Palme d'Or. It tracks a young female influencer and male model who find themselves on a free cruise with a group of rich people, including some billionaires. One is a fertilizer magnate from Russia; one a sad software billionaire traveling alone; and two aging but very proper British arms dealers. The captain is Woody Harrelson, a left-wing drunk or weed-smoker who doesn't want to come out of his cabin.

The Craptin's Din Din

Films that might remind you of this one? The class reversal of Swept Away by Lina Wertmueller; the hedonistic cruise and its termination in The Wolf of Wall Street by Martin Scorsese; the idiotic 'blue steel' looks of Zoolander by Ben Stiller; or the poor treatment of tourism workers in White Lotus, Season 1. There's even a bit of Lord of the Flies here at the end. We've come a long way from Love Boat or Gilligan's Island folks.

The two seemingly central characters are good looking air-heads – almost a parody of 20-somethings. They live marginal lives making money while barely working except to take selfies in bathing suits and with pasta they don't eat. They have idiotic arguments yet still care for each other... kinda. They get a free cruise on some body of water...it's not clear. And that cruise goes very wrong.

The over-priced gluttony of the wealthy (and by implication, probably every other cruise) is highlighted at a chaotic 'captains dinner' in the middle of a vicious storm. Not one of these rich hedonists is ever without some champagne or prosecco in a flute glass, suppled by a willing servant. The  guests make capricious demands - the sail should be properly laundered; a male crew member offensively took off his shirt; the crew should all go swimming. This latter puts one poor serving girl in a precarious position related to her job; the second gets another fired; the first leads to a smile by Harrelson, as there are no sails on this ship.

The workers and servers closest to the guests are all light-skinned Europeans from a Scandinavian country; the lower reaches – the engine room, the toilet detail and cleaning squads, the cooks – are darker-skinned. The Marxist captain and the Russian billionaire get into a hilarious political argument between socialism and capitalism during the storm. (Yes, it's a European film...) Harrelson even gets some points in about the assassinations of King, the Kennedy's and Malcolm X by the U.S. government. The storm produces another one of those projectile vomiting scenes so beloved in comedies, like the famous pie-eating contest in Steven King's Stand By Me. Then the servants get to clean up.  The ship becomes a metaphor for what is going on in the world at large.

The dictatorship of the Female Toilet Help

Eventually the ship sinks due to an explosion caused by African pirates ... and only a few on board survive, cast away on an ostensibly deserted island. In the process, the arms dealers experience a bit of fatal irony.

In the real world the castaways would be discovered pretty quickly. Stranded, they have to arrange themselves into a new society... a matriarchy run by an Asian cleaning woman who knows how to fish and make fires, while the rest are almost incompetent. Two men are caught stealing food and letting the fire grow cold and are punished for it. The cute male model becomes a whore for fish. The billionaires can't get anything for their Rolex watches. The cruise supervisor is relegated to a lower position. It's a tiny dictatorship of the proletariat. The kinder billionaire finally kills a wild donkey, and is celebrated as a real 'hunter.' The ending lets you guess whether that dictatorship continues, or whether the outside class system reasserts itself.

One of the funniest lines is when the Russian oligarch reminds the Asian woman, when she is telling them they will get less food than her because she does most of the work, that she should remember the famous Marxist line: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” He dumps his capitalist thinking immediately when the props to his wealth disappear.

This film is over-the-top on purpose and still engaging. I also paid only 3 Euros for it. What the 'art crowd' of Hungarians I was sitting with thought of the socialistic points I don't know. I would have preferred a subtler exposure of wealth and stupidity, which would have struck more viewers as realistic and closer to their lives, and ultimately been even more subversive. Clearly the rich are not having a good time in many films, as they are a no-holds barred target in many movies. This reflects the growing class-consciousness among the masses of people and even artists. The Triangle of Sadness (the crease area between and above your eyebrows...?) or it's French title Without Filters is another movie in this tradition of bashing the wealthy.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms: “White Lotus,” “Parasite,” “Wolf of Wall Street,” “Squid Game,” “Cloud Atlas,” “Nomadland,” “High Hopes,” “The Hunger Games,” “In Dubious Battle,” “New Order.”

The Kultur Kommissar

November 21, 2022 / Budapest