Foreign Films + Keaton > Contemporary American Cinema, Weekly Reel #36
A week with a few triumphs but more than enough disappointments to leave a bad stench. Can someone tell me who’s giving David O. Russell production funds and why?
News of the Week: nothing to report.
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Triangle of Sadness (2022, Ruben Östlund, France/Germany/Sweden/UK/USA) is an international co-production that everyone wanted a piece of. This is Östlund’s first film since winning the Palme d’Or in 2017 for The Square, which means he’ll now be a rotating figure on the awards circuit. For his next picture, Östlund found funding from two dozen production companies and government film funds from half a dozen countries. And their investment paid off because Triangle of Sadness also won the Palme d’Or, making Östlund the third director to win that award for consecutive films.
Drawing on the satirical black humor of his previous films, Triangle of Sadness confronts the triangle of class, beauty, and wealth. It starts with Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean, RIP), a modeling couple, after a few scenes showing Carl go through the audition process and watching Yaya’s show, having an argument about paying the bill at an expensive restaurant. She makes a lot more money than him, and her attitude when the bill came, expecting him to pay immediately, annoyed him. Their argument extends into the Uber and then the hotel elevator. Before leaving the car, the Uber driver tells Carl in confidence to fight for her if he really wants her. The rest of the film is about Carl deciding whether he should fight or not. But not before a laundry list of scenes of the uber-wealthy, on a yacht and then an island, getting their due.
The contents in no particular order: sad v. happy modelling brands, drunk Marxist captain of the yacht (played by Woody Harrelson), Russian fertilizer oligarch, lovely old British couple retired from their career in the arms industry (specialists in hand grenades and land mines, the latter being banned by the UN), a disabled German lady that can only say “ja,” “nein,” oder “In den Wolken,” a crew of servicepeople doing their best “Below Deck” performance, a nauseous dinner scene reminiscent of this opening from “The Office,” scatological delight, and pretzel sticks.
The female lead, Charlbi Dean, died irl in August from an unspecified illness before the film premiered theatrically. She was only thirty-two. Her performance as the runway supermodel objet désir was radiant and we were certainly robbed of a gifted acting career.
This film is best viewed in a crowded theater, which I had luckily planned, because of its crowd-pleasing humor for one-hundred and forty-nine minutes. Whereas Östlund’s two previous films went for satire-heavy dramatic scenes, Triangle of Sadness is a more overt comedy in how it presses one’s belly for laughter. And while the two previous films revealed the boundaries of humanity through short bursts of tense moments, this film pushes humanity in extremis in infinitum. In short, if the shit hits the fan, quite literally, what are humans worth without their wealth and class positions? Until the very last shots, this notion of who goes where is maintained and assessed from various angles. Anybody who knows Östlund will know that the elites don’t fare well. He finds how best to approach the “eat the rich” limits, then hovers there until the planks hit the shore.
Triangle of Sadness will hopefully still be playing at a couple of theaters around you, but you might have to stretch the usual commute.
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Force Majeure (2014, Ruben Östlund, Sweden/France/Norway) is another black comedy from Ruben Östlund, which I pressed play on as soon as I got back from Triangle of Sadness. It’s about a mixed Swedish-Norwegian married couple—I certainly couldn’t tell the difference—vacationing with their two children in the French Alps. While they were eating lunch outside on the hotel balcony, a controlled avalanche in the distance gains power and reaches their position quite forcefully. As it gets closer, it’s clear the family and other patrons need to clear out of danger fast, so while the mist of the avalanche blasts them, the father runs away immediately while the wife, alone, must carry, unsuccessfully, her two children to safety. (Don’t worry, this is a black comedy.) They survive, the avalanche stopped just in front of the hotel, and the husband comes back to a changed family, one where the children are unsure of their parents and the wife is uncertain of the man she married.
While Östlund squeezes every ounce of laughter for Triangle of Sadness, he holds a tauter line of satire for Force Majeure—the name coming from the legal clause that covers all parties from liability against acts of God and such, in this case, against an avalanche that threatens the structure of a family. This film, which any other week could’ve been the film of the week, is amazing at depicting the aspects of manhood and what it means in a relationship, with or without kids. The B-story stars Kristofer Hivju (Tormund Giantsbane himself), a friend of the husband also at the hotel, who’s agitated when his half-his-age girlfriend ridicules him and says that he would’ve ran in that avalanche situation too. In both relationships, the men confront their own ideas of how to be men, showing the comical breakdown of those egos. And like Triangle of Sadness, it waits until the final scenes of the film to resolve the conflict that plagued most of the film in hilarious darkness.
Subscribers of Showtime, DirecTV, and Magnolia Selects can watch it. Otherwise, watch Force Majeure for free on Kanopy.
The Navigator (1924, Buster Keaton and Donald Crisp, USA) is one of the Keaton feature films during his golden era—some say his finest. Keaton plays a wealthy suitor, doing his best Bertie Wooster, who decides to get married one morning. He has his Wodehouse arrange the honeymoon and takes a chauffeured ride across the street to propose to his girlfriend. She declines, out of self-respecting modesty, and he leaves dismayed, deciding he’ll go on the honeymoon anyway. Later that night, he boards the wrong ship liner when he loses his ticket, which is the ship that competing sides in a war are attempting to steal for spy activities. The ship is owned by the father of Keaton’s girlfriend, who both show up after Keaton. She boards but the belligerents kidnap her father, who then unmoor the ship and send it out to sea with only Keaton and his girlfriend on board. The next morning, they wander around the empty ship, and after a chase where neither can see one another but can hear, Keaton literally lands next to her in one of the most iconic stunts in film history. From there, they must learn how to survive on the ship through menial tasks like cooking and cleaning, from which their privilege has shielded them.
More than most Keaton films, The Navigator invents many different cinematic techniques that we still see today. For instance, to adapt to the ship’s mass-production kitchen equipment, they use a set of strings and levers to perform the basic tasks. Besides from these, Keaton flexes his nautical humor in physically entertaining ways, like when he dons the primitive metal scuba-suit and has a swordfight using a swordfish against another swordfish. Even ninety-eight years later, nobody has been able to surpass his combination of stunts and camera techniques. He understood the camera space his characters existed in more than Chaplin and beyond, who was often just a funny-walking man in a melodrama. Like many Keaton six-reelers (approx. one hour of film footage), he doesn’t perform any stunts for the first ten minutes. He sets up the story seriously, putting us off a bit, then when things go awry, his physical reactions leave us in awe. Unlike many filmmakers, and comedians, from the nineteen-twenties, Keaton has withstood the test of time better than most—even The Hangover is suffering from nausea now—to become a classic of classics.
The film is in the public domain, so you can watch it on YouTube, but if you want a higher quality restoration, then you can stream in for free on Kanopy.
Pass
Amsterdam (2022, David O. Russell, USA) is a piece of shit.
TFW No GF (2020, Alex Lee Moyer, USA) is best ignored like the incels it tries to normalize.
A Most Violent Year (2014, J. C. Chandor, USA) is a crime drama starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain that was one of the first films A24 picked up for distribution. If you squint your eyes tight, you can make out the faint outline of a gangster flick. Otherwise, it fails to make itself into anything interesting.
Kursk (2018, Thomas Vinterberg, France/Belgium/Luxembourg) is a dud from Vinterberg that may be a good example of directors making genre films they aren’t adept at making. It’s about the real story of a Russian nuclear submarine that had an explosion on board that sank the sub and trapped a handful of crew members. The incident, which Russia managed very poorly, felt like just another Western exploitation of bad-Russians-speaking-English-movie without much substance. Even Léa Seydoux’s performance felt mild and atypical of her powers.
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