Sweden’s Ruben Ostlund wins Cannes’ top prize with Triangle Of Sadness
CANNES, FRANCE (AFP) – On Saturday (May 28), the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund won the film festival’s highest award for the Cannes Film Festival for the second time in five years with Triangle Of Sadness, a biting, cruelly fun social satire.
With the help of Ostlund’s now cult-provoking style, the film places models and the ultra-rich on a cruise ship, only to find that their status is suddenly undermined by unexpected events.
“We had a goal to really try to make an exciting film for the audience and bring some thoughtful content,” he said as he received the statuette at a gala ceremony on the French Riviera.
“To entertain them, ask themselves questions, go out after the show and have something to talk about.”
The 48-year-old director has already taken a scalpel to modern bourgeois subtleties with his Gold Palm-winning art world launch The Square 2017.
Triangle Of Sadness, named after the part of the face where wrinkled eyebrows create wrinkles, was an early favorite at the 12-day cinema screening, with a total of 21 images in battle.
The film can be read as a critique of capitalism and its exaggerations, he said.
A key scene in the film features the captain of a luxury yacht – played by US star Woody Harrelson – and a Russian billionaire, both drunk, trade quotes by the philosopher Karl Marx and the hard-working capitalist Ronald Reagan, the late US president.
An increased sequence of projectile vomiting and violent diarrhea on the cruise ship made the audience either howl with laughter or turn green.