Triangle of Sadness

TRIANGLE OF SADNESS   **

Ruben Östlund

2022

IDEA:  Models and social-media influencers Carl and Yaya - whose romance is on the rocks - win a spot on a luxury cruise where things turns from bad to worse in short order.

BLURB:  The centerpiece sequence of Triangle of Sadness concerns the violent gastrointestinal upheaval of elderly passengers aboard a luxury cruise. Acted and edited as a rising symphony of comically timed bodily expulsions, it’s an extended piece of gross-out farce that effectively undercuts the put-together privilege of the characters by reducing them to their crudest corporeal functions. As queasily funny and often cathartic as it is, the scene’s broad, in-your-face approach to satire is also disappointingly emblematic of Triangle of Sadness’s overall strategy and tenor. Across the film’s unforgivably bloated runtime, Östlund consistently squanders opportunities to more trenchantly examine the class dynamics at play among the ship’s affluent patrons and its laborers. His aptitude for scalpel-sharp, squirm-inducing sociological dissection - so richly displayed in Force Majeure and The Square - has here been replaced by caricatures, ideological pontificating, and tepid, groaningly obvious cultural commentary. Equally galling is the relative absence of Östlund’s customary scene-building rigor. Although his actors, particularly Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean, bring a sense of rhythm and precision-timing to their performances, they’re at odds with slackly paced, unimaginatively staged sequences that fail to gather either dramatic or comedic momentum. This is never truer than in the film’s final chapter, a familiar stranded-on-an-island scenario that mostly results in predictable, cynical observations about how even societal reorganization can’t eradicate our entrenched capitalist systems. For all its quotations of Marx, Triangle of Sadness is awfully content with resignedly repeating this into dogma.

Close

Part of my coverage of the 58th Chicago International Film Festival.

CLOSE   ***1/2

Lukas Dhont

2022

IDEA:  A tragedy ruptures the intimate friendship between young Belgian teens Leo and Remi.

BLURB:  Emotions in childhood are tricky things; there’s perhaps no other time in life when they’re simultaneously so intensely felt and so difficult to verbally communicate. It’s in this inchoate, inarticulate space where Close locates its drama and grows its tragedy. The cruel irony is that Leo and Remi don’t need to define their relationship at all; their friendship is a bond that defies explanation, and one that only comes apart when previously unacknowledged gender mores and the self-image sensitivities of adolescence are made conscious. One of the canny achievements of Close is how it evokes a tumult of shame, envy, anger, and grief in a way that’s rooted in the headspace of subjects for whom those feelings are unevenly legible. Rather than attempt to explicate or psychoanalyze, Dhont simply observes patiently and quietly, his camera - often lingering in limpid closeup - picking up all the slight variations in the boys’ dispositions. Leo’s reticence of speech in particular forces us to lean in closer, to scrutinize his countenance and behavior and reflect on how those things may or may not belie what he’s thinking at any given moment. This inquisitive orientation also holds true for Remi’s mother Sophie (a superb Émilie Dequenne), suggesting how adults might not always be so much more proficient than their children in matters of emotional fluency. Dhont impressively avoids the clichés one would expect to populate a premise tailor-made for mawkish tear-wringing. He remains honest and relatively unsentimental in his dramatization of the slow, lurching, and frequently delayed shockwaves that follow a seismic personal disruption. The potency of Close, ultimately, rests on the shoulders of its sensational young duo Gustav de Waele and Eden Dambrine. Like the film itself, they pack huge emotions into a small package, with or without words.

EO

Part of my coverage of the 58th Chicago International Film Festival.

EO   ***

Jerzy Skolimowski

2022

IDEA:  Passed from owner to owner, a circus donkey witnesses human kindnesses and brutalities.

BLURB:  To what degree do animals have internal lives, thoughts, and imaginations, and to what degree do we simply anthropomorphize them? Without denying the latter inevitable impulse, Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO endeavors to express a consciousness beyond the limited scope of human perception. When the writer-director and DP Michał Dymek aren’t reveling in the tactile earthly textures of donkey fur, grass, and mud, they’re launching into hallucinatory flights of fancy that suggest something like the titular creature’s fever dreams. Suddenly, the image might become drenched in a hellish crimson, the camera detached from any corporeal subjectivity as it soars weightlessly over forests and streams or curiously examines the travails of a four-legged robot. We always return to the donkey, who looks alternately indifferent and perturbed as Paweł Mykietyn’s booming trance-cum-classical score floods the acoustic environment with foreboding. What is EO really seeing and feeling? The shape and content of Skolimowski’s montage – which is driven by an often inscrutable, arbitrary-seeming logic – conveys a sense of temporal confusion and alienation. Perhaps EO is feeling obsolete in a modern world where his labor has become outmoded due to mechanized industry. Most likely he doesn’t much care about us humans, whose cruelties and follies appear as mere dots on the periphery of his implacable journey, until they actively impede his progress. EO may be directly inspired by Bresson’s classic Au Hasard Balthazar, but it has just as much in common with Viktor Kossakovsky’s Gunda or even Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, films that seek to channel non-human perspectives by confounding our naturalized modes of experiencing the world. Skolimowski’s film is a similarly transfixing, at times bewildering audiovisual trip, gesturing toward something insuperably out of grasp.

The Woman King

THE WOMAN KING   **1/2

Gina Prince-Bythewood

2022

IDEA:  In 1820s West Africa, a young orphaned woman trains to become a warrior with the Agojie, an elite all-female battalion fighting for the Kingdom of Dahomey.

BLURB:  Such is the incremental yet steady march of social progress that it might not dawn on the viewer how uncommon The Woman King is, or how improbable it would have seemed not that long ago. Here is a big-budget Hollywood historical action epic helmed by a black woman with black women occupying all the main action roles, and most of the other roles, as well. It’s a film that illuminates, even through its fair share of factual distortions, sides of African history, culture, and geopolitics that rarely appear, let alone act as the subjects of, major American studio releases. This is not to suggest that The Woman King should be evaluated wholly based on the relative scarceness of stories like it, or that its import as such should shield it from criticism. Despite the fresh subject matter, the film remains highly traditional at the script level, committed as it is to banal “let’s-go-to-battle” and family melodrama idioms. Visually, it lacks the grandeur of its genre forebears; the costumes and sets are lush, but the flat digital lensing and choppily edited action scenes leave something to be desired. That last point is ironic considering The Woman King’s emphasis on ferocious women warriors and their combat prowess. While Prince-Bythewood certainly leans hard on the physical badassery, the film is more satisfying as a portrait of sisterhood, a celebration of the community solidarity that’s no less integral than brute strength in making the Agojie a force to be reckoned with. In the quiet, intimate moments shared between Nawi (a fantastic Thuso Mbedu), Nanisca, Izogie, and others, The Woman King rises above its more rote trappings to prove its mettle.