Triangle of Sadness (2022)

I saved this for one of my last viewings of Best Picture nominees from 2022 because, well, just look at the title. Only recently did I learn that it's partly comic. Netflix will stop streaming it soon, and I had 147 minutes to kill, so I obliged.

Few films have such an explicit three-act structure. First we get a few scenes involving models Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), who are dating but prone to argumentation over financial matters. Part 2, on a luxury yacht in an unspecified waterwa,y splits the focus among many customers and staffers. Carl and Yaya get a little more central again when they are among eight castaways on an island, shaking up the social order. (The title is what someone in the modeling industry calls an area of the face, but it works on multiple levels.)

Ruben Östlund directs, mostly in English this time. Unlike Play, it's not my idea of an art flick. The cinematography isn't torturous, tho the camera does slowly rock during a storm at sea. Get used to seeing a lot of vomit for a while. Glad I've already enjoyed cruises.

As is all too common for European comedies, we're supposed to laugh at the rich. I did find myself a little more tickled by some of their silliness than usual, but that's not saying much. It's actually pretty credible in its gratuitous complication of interactions.

In fairness, elitists aren't the only ones in the crosshairs. The captain (Woody Harrelson) is an admittedly hypocritical self-described Marxist, who gets into drunken antics with an ironically capitalist oligarch (Zlatko Burić, not a real Russian). The crew members are a bit more professional, but they too show their true colors in dire straits. Honestly, it's hard to like or respect anyone after Part 1, regardless of race, nationality, or socioeconomic status. Well, maybe the woman with a post-stroke disability (Iris Berben). Or the baby, whose absence from Part 3 implies just how dark the comedy goes.

This isn't Titanic, so we skip any action between the moment of disaster and the beach arrival. The drama rarely approaches the level of a thriller, and not just because we've been taught not to care too much about the victims. The ending is deliberately ambiguous.

ToS isn't one of the top five for the year, and I can see why it didn't net any Oscars. But I don't begrudge its nominations. Östlund generally knew what he was doing.