Does Ruben Östlund read Sianne Ngai?

The former’s latest film seems to echo the latter’s

account of late capitalism’s triangle of zaniness (i.e, work, affect and performance). Indeed,
Triangle of Sadness is most incisive when the film explores the function of role-playing and
emotion in relation to labor: influencers goes on vacation and takes smiling photos as part of
their job; a bare-chested deckhand puts on a smile and poses as if he’s model while grinding
away at his actual task; crew members are suddenly asked to pause their main duty and go
swimming to entertain a bored guest’s request. At the conclusion of the first chapter, our
protagonists' romantic relationship is revealed to be an integral component of their influencer
careers. And as the third chapter reiterates, even in a mode of production detached from (yet
haunted by) capitalism, a man with barely any productive skills can still gain an economic
advantage simply by playing the role of a boyfriend.
Such nuances in the film, sadly, tend to get overshadowed by Östlund's louder yet less
penetrating rants. Repeatedly, the director gives way to his worst impulses, namely his broad
strokes of comedy and his blunt attempts at satire - one which I found too obvious and almost as
unlikeable as its targets. Triangle of Sadness is the kind of film where one character casually
mentions the fact that male models make less money than their female counterparts in its very
first scene, only for this point to be spelt out at least twice more in later conversations. Likewise,
I am not sure if the vomit sequence in the second chapter needs to run that long to drive home
the point. Other than that Tati-inspired scene that’s clearly impressive, most of that segment
feels repetitive and even predictable.
Much of the film’s wasted potential also lies in the third chapter, which reimagines Lina
Wertmüller’s Swept Away albeit lacking much of that brilliant 1975 film’s ambivalence and
slipperiness. Östlund's ending, in particular, feels like a rather hastened and reductive
conclusion for a situation where too many interesting dynamics are at stake, and for a film with
two similarly fraught relationships where the romantic/transactional dichotomy seems to have
completely dissolved. What’s interesting about the lover/worker conflation is not only that
performing couplehood can be a lucrative job, but also that one needs to possess certain skills
and puts in certain work to maintain being in a couple. Inspired by Woody Harrelson’s character
who keeps randomly quoting his favorite critical theorist, I cannot help but look up what mine
has to say here. And I was not disappointed to find that she does kind of hint at the unexplored
flip-side of Östlund's allegory while also making a case for its thematic richness. “The sex-
affective practice of adultery and the aesthetic about the sex-affective labor that is post-Fordist
zaniness are thus mirror images of each other [….]. Both are responses to the convergence of
work and play that increasingly defines private and public life in late capitalism" - Marx might
be read out loud in this zany film, but it's Ngai who best illuminates what it might have to offer.