After The Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund Wants to Run Circles Around His Audience

The day before Ruben Östlund was named President of the jury of the Cannes Film Festival, the director was imagining screening his next film at the festival. “I have to tell you briefly about this scene that I’m planning to do,” Östlund said, while talking to Film Companion over Zoom. “In this film, it will be an anti-climax scene. Probably going to be the most provocative scene I’ve done.”

The scenario, as Östlund visualised it, could have been from one of his films. The Grand Auditorium Louis Lumière is filled with people dressed in formal finery. They’re seated with great anticipation to watch the new film by a Cannes favourite — Östlund has won the festival’s grand prize Palme d’Or twice; he’s been part of the jury for the prestigious Un Certain Regard section — and they’re expecting to be wildly entertained, the way they were by Östlund’s two previous films, The Square (2017) and The Triangle of Sadness (2022), which releases in Indian theatres this week. 

In Östlund’s imaginary scene, the screening begins. The film is called The Entertainment System is Down and it’s set in a long-haul flight in which the in-flight entertainment system conks out. At the point where one would expect a climax, we see a little boy, who is travelling with his mother and elder brother, demand the iPad. His mother tells him that he can only have it if he sits patiently for eight minutes, doing nothing. “And then I was thinking of going into a real-time experience of what the boy is dealing with and I’m going to challenge the audience in the cinema,” Östlund said. “Now you have to sit there and relax, now you have to deal with being bored.” His eyes were shining with delighted glee. Grinning, he added, “I think it’s going to be the biggest walkout in the history of Cannes.”

Östlund got the idea of The Entertainment System is Down from an actual psychological study, which seems apt since the director’s films can sometimes feel like elaborate thought experiments. He sets his stories in elite spaces and mines them for comedy by introducing elements that leave his characters unsettled — and then screens them to audiences that include the elite. In his breakout film, Force Majeure (2014), a husband abandons his wife and two children at a luxury alpine resort when there’s the threat of an avalanche — only to have to return when it turns out that was a false alarm. The Square is set in the art world and its climactic scene sees an artist bring chaos to a formal banquet with his performance project. In The Triangle of Sadness, there’s the infamous “boat scene” in which Östlund spends almost 15 minutes battering a high-end cruise ship and its super-rich guests in a storm of vomit, faeces and raw sewage. Meanwhile, the captain and a Russian oligarch — both drunk as skunks — lock themselves in the captain’s cabin and throw quotes by the likes of Karl Marx, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at one another. Rarely have the elite been torn down with as much savagery and humour as they are in a Ruben Östlund film. In what may be seen as an act of either magnanimity or guilty catharsis, cinema’s elite have lavished the director with prizes for these takedowns. The Square won the Palme d’Or and the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The Triangle of Sadness also won the Palme d’Or and has three Oscar nominations, including those for best film, best director and best original screenplay. And now, for his next film, Östlund is hoping for a walkout.  

Yet for all the biting satire, there’s also something deeply hopeful about Östlund’s films. They’re founded upon an implicit faith that art is powerful, that there’s beauty in chaos, and that human beings are capable of course-correction. For instance, in The Triangle of Sadness, when the luxury cruise gets shipwrecked, the survivors organise themselves into a new social order in which a working-class, immigrant, single woman is at the top of the pyramid. “When we end up on a deserted island, what is happening is that we are very good at collaborating,” said Östlund, adding that he was inspired by the work of Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. “There are very few conflicts and we’re also accepting new hierarchies quite quickly. And we understand to create conflicts is dangerous for us, so we would definitely not go into conflicts.”

Raised by a single mother who still proudly calls herself a Communist, Östlund grew up on a non-deserted island in the southern Göteburg Archipelago of Sweden, surrounded by “a lot of loud political discussions”. In sharp contrast to their mother, Östlund’s older brother is a “Right-wing liberal”, which has made for lively family dinners. As a child, Östlund would hide the spines of his mother’s Marxist books when friends came over. “Being brought up during the Eighties, Sweden was in the middle, between the two superpowers, the Western World and the Eastern bloc,” said Östlund. “To be a Swede, you were navigating yourself between these two ideologies that were bashing their heads against each other.” He emerged into adulthood and a new century with a belief system that gives the most importance to equality and sees merit in conflicting ideologies. “To me, the biggest threat to equality is individualism. The opposite of socialism is not capitalism. The opposite of socialism is individualism,” he said. “I believe that the struggle for equality is an ongoing struggle and it always has to be there for us to try to create an equal society. As soon as you stop fighting for equality, inequality will happen.” 

The worlds that Östlund creates in his films are riddled with different kinds of imbalances and anxieties. For instance, one of the sharpest scenes in The Triangle of Sadness is one in which a young couple, both of them models, argue about who will pay the bill at a fancy restaurant. At the start of the scene, Östlund includes a brief moment when you can see a small fire in the blurry background, foreshadowing the flare-up that’s going to happen when Carl reminds Yaya, his girlfriend, that she’d promised to pay this bill. (By the end of their conversation, he’s literally got his back to the wall.) The scene is actually taken from real life. “It was something that happened when I met my wife (fashion photographer Sina Görcz),” said Östlund. The two were at Cannes Film Festival — “I wanted to impress her,” he remembered with a smile — and at one point, it struck him that he was going to have to point out that he wasn’t interested in playing the role of a traditional, masculine provider and protector. “I knew immediately that I like this woman a lot and I really, really want to spend my time with her. But I also felt that she had a very old-fashioned and stereotypical idea of men and women,” Östlund said, laughing. “And I felt like ‘Ok, it’s not going to be possible for me to play this role of being this man who is paying for the bill every time we’re going to the restaurant’ because I’m brought up by this mother who has been telling me, ‘You have to be equal. Otherwise you’re not going to be happy’.”  

Östlund fictionalised that moment from his real life to create a scene that uses discomfort to bring out a volley of social issues. “I felt like that — being in a restaurant, with a woman, as a man, and the bill comes on the table — that is exactly about economy, sexuality, beauty. It’s about gender expectations and it’s about the patriarchal system of course. So I always try to do that. Even if you have a theme of a film that you in some way are intellectual or have at an intellectual level, I always try to find a situation in which I feel, ‘Ah, here is where it’s connected with my everyday life’, where you can discuss it on a level that is not intellectual at all,” he said. 

Although it is frequently outlandish, there’s an unexpected earnestness to The Triangle of Sadness. Unlike The Square or Force Majeure, where the social messaging is subtly folded into the drama, The Triangle of Sadness makes no bones about wanting to give the audience a crash course in sociology. The fantastic critical reception that the film has received suggests audiences are ready to be schooled by Östlund and that the faith he reposes in art may not be misguided. His chosen medium has to navigate the demands of capitalism and dangers of consumerism, but the filmmaker remains unfazed. “For me, creativity is a force that’s as strong as consumption,” said  Östlund. “I love to consume, but I also love to create. The only thing you can replace consumerism with is creativity.”

You can watch the entire interview with Ruben Östlund here.

The Triangle of Sadness releases in select Indian theatres on March 3. Force Majeure and The Square are available to stream on Prime Video.