At the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, the top prize went to Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, one of the most wickedly vicious satires in movie history about top models and tycoons on a super mega yacht with a Marxist captain — the ship crashes, the characters find themselves on the uninhabited island, and the most outrageous and hilarious chaos ensues. The director had previously dominated Cannes, and thus Östlund entered a very exclusive club of directors who won the Palme d'Or more than once, joining virtuosos Michael Haneke, Francis Ford Coppola, the Dardenne brothers, Ken Loach, Emir Kusturica, Bille August, and Shohei Imamura.

Östlund had been a Cannes darling for a while ever since his third feature, Force Majeure, earned the Jury Prize in 2014. Then, of course, came The Square, loosely based on his and his producer Kalle Boman’s art installation that is simultaneously a social experiment. The most sassy, sharp, and paradoxical film at the festival of 2017 secured Östlund’s first Palme d'Or. Let’s try to break down the style of this quick-witted delinquent director and find out what role Swedish anarchists, edgy performance artists, and snow sports play in his satirical annihilation of bourgeois values.

Östlund’s Inspirations

Ruben Östlund’s film Play
Plattform Produktion

One of Östlund’s major and most obvious influences is the great Michael Haneke, with his unforgiving, scathing satires of European bourgeoisie, with his films like “a satanic soap opera of pure sociopathy,” as described by The Guardian. In his films, Haneke gives modern society a gloomy diagnosis, and Östlund doesn’t hide the fact that he has been watching Haneke since his days at film school: “After I watched Code Unknown, I seriously thought that I should stay in the cinema after the screening and clean up after everyone. Haneke's ideas about personal responsibility to each other had a strong influence on me. I thank God that Haneke lives and shoots right now. And he does it in such a European way — his films are always very beautiful and equally ruthless."

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There are also some peculiar links to Swedish anarchists in Östlund’s films. Triangle of Sadness contains several quotes from the Swedish writer and journalist Stig Dagerman, who turned the Swedish Anarcho-Syndicalist Youth Federation newspaper into one of the most talked about newspapers in the country. Nowadays, Dagerman is put on the same pedestal as Kafka and Camus, and there are awards given in his name — which in fact he would probably hate.

Östlund’s pool of references includes Eastern European, unconventional, anti-establishment artists, too. Oleg Rogozin, a man-gorilla who terrorized the respectable audience in The Square, is an homage to Oleg Kulik’s famous performance The Mad Dog, in which the artist explored animality and bit both his viewers and the curators’ daughters.

Östlund's Anti-Capitalist Crusade

Ruben Östlund movie Force Majeur
TriArt Film

Östlund filmed athletes training at the ski resorts where he worked in the summer, and the footage was so good that it got him into the Gothenburg film school. The future master of grotesque mischief kept thinking about how to return to these resorts — and that’s how the dark comedy Force Majeure, the first feature in his anti-capitalist trilogy, came to be. Östlund told The New York Times that he had two goals when making this film: “One is to create the most spectacular avalanche in film history. The other is to increase the rate of divorce.”

The auteur’s quirky and experimental style (that was already present in his debut The Guitar Mongoloid) finally grew into itself in the teenage petty crime drama Play, an inventive and harsh take on Swedish tolerance and multiculturalism that caused quite a stir in Swedish liberal society and even got declared racist by the left-wing publicists. In Force Majeure, Östlund went even further. The story of an exemplary family man who, at the moment of an avalanche at a ski resort, fled to save himself instead of his wife and children, has become a universal and caustic indictment on the proclaimed values ​​of a democratic society and capitalism.

The art museum in The Square
TriArt Film

Considered one of the best movies that premiered at Cannes, The Square, the second installment in the anti-capitalist trilogy, ridicules the world of polished contemporary art with its curators, vernissages, and Actionism. The main character, a modern art gallery curator, leads a rather bohemian life, drives a Tesla, and thinks only of highbrow things. His latest art project is "Square," a small, fenced street space outside the museum, which has a sign saying that this is a special area of ​​care and trust, where equal rights and obligations will always be respected. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go as planned.

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The idea of his latest work, the satirical Cannes standout Triangle of Sadness, came to Östlund after he researched Marxism and saw a study with kids where they were asked whether they would prefer to be beautiful or smart — and the majority chose the former. He decided to document in his own way the atrocities and absurdities of the modeling business. A comedic, nauseating satire of the ultra-rich and famous, Triangle of Sadness completes Östlund’s artful anti-capitalist trilogy.

Triangle of Sadness: Subtle or Grotesque?

Triangle of Sadness cast
Neon

In an interview with The Guardian, Östlund mentions that he doesn’t see himself as a fiction film director but rather as a documentary maker that accidentally fell into drama. Satire feeling like a documentary seems like a popular sentiment these days, with Cate Blanchett noting that Don’t Look Up got way too real, way too fast, and Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker taking a break from his show because reality became too bleak and ridiculous to parody.

Östlund’s piercing look is directed at all the sacred cows of modern society: the world of high fashion and art, the ultra-rich, and how they are when stripped of all the golden husk. He studies the peculiarities of human behavior when faced with a crisis under a magnifying glass. In Östlund’s words: “All my films are about people trying to avoid losing face.”

Woody Harrelson in Triangle of Sadness
Neon

While taking digs at modern social culture can be very successful as with The Square and Don’t Look Up, it can also fall on its face easily, as happened with The Circle and Not Okay. Despite receiving an eight-minute standing ovation, Triangle of Sadness ditches the filmmaker's usual subtlety, and that doesn’t sit quite well with some critics. The Guardian gives it a paltry two out of five stars and writes that Östlund’s “heavy-handed satire on the super-rich loses its shape,” while the BBC even calls it, “The most disgusting film of 2022.”

To be fair, Östlund was always balancing the line between irony and grotesque: as part of The Square promotion, a video was released in which people within the compounds of the aforementioned space of equal rights and obligations blow up a girl with explosives. This video has millions of views on YouTube. After all, satire rightfully remains an incredibly controversial genre and is supposed to make you uncomfortable — and Östlund excels at that.