Let’s dedicate ourselves to the throwing up in Cannes today. No, this is not about the many fish restaurants in the Rue Félix Faure, the prices of which can make you a little sick. But the seafood is usually very ok. It’s more about the comedy “Triangle of Sadness”, which celebrated its world premiere in the competition for the Palme d’Or. If the award were given to the film with the most vomit – the winner would be determined.
Swedish director Ruben Östlund won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2017 for his art market satire “The Square”. And this time he is likely to be at least one of the narrower circle of winning candidates among the 21 films in the competition. In “Triangle of Sadness” he tells the story of a handsome, young and rich couple. Yaya (Charlbi Dean) is an influencer, Carl (Harris Dickinson) is a model, and in the first act you get to watch them for a while through their influencer-model relationship difficulties. That’s pretty funny. But it only really starts when the two go on a cruise on a luxury yacht with other rich people. All forms of wealth meet there, old and young, analogue and digital – and all gaga.
All the sphincters fail, the premiere audience looks piqued
The core scene of the film is the Captain’s Dinner on board the yacht. This big oyster feast takes place during a violent storm. As a result, it becomes bad for everyone. But not soggy like after one glass of champagne too much. But really. The ship rocks and wobbles, the wine glasses and expensive crockery rattle, and one by one the guests start throwing up. Östlund keeps increasing the scene to the point of absurdity. As soon as you think more vomit is not possible, there is a lot more. And then more. And then a lot more.
Here the stomachs don’t rebel yet: Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson in “Triangle of Sadness”.
(Photo: Festival de Cannes)
Soon the whole dining room is throwing up like crazy, and some of them are also throwing up at the back. The actress Sunnyi Melles, who has a small guest role in this film (like Iris Berben, by the way), takes it furthest. Her intestines explode on truly movie-historical proportions until she swims in an incredible lake of brown feces-puke. In contrast, the finale of “The Big Food” was quite a baby fart.
Even if the premiere guests of “Triangle of Sadness” initially reacted rather incredulous to piqued: This is of course great slapstick art. At some point everyone was laughing like crazy. The film is by far the funniest in the competition so far and the film with the most power, shaking the audience for two and a half hours. Not just because of the dinner scene. In the third act, the yacht explodes – pirate attack! -, and the cruise troop stranded on an island. A “Lord of the Flies” follows in the luxury neglected edition, with a bizarre ending that of course you can’t tell. The film is scheduled to hit cinemas in Germany in the fall, get your stomachs ready.
Which brings us to the puke in Cannes, part two. Also in competition was horror veteran David Cronenberg’s sci-fi thriller Crimes of the Future. In the future of this film, people randomly and disgustingly mutate and no longer feel physical pain. In nocturnal art actions, bodies are scratched and slit open with scalpels. “Surgery is the new sex,” we hear repeatedly. There are many detailed shots of knives sliding into bodies, of slippery intestines, swellings and tumors – again not for the faint of heart.
Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) star in the art surgery underground scene in this film. Saul keeps growing new organs and his girlfriend removes them in front of an audience. For a particularly quick and uncomplicated access to his intestines, a doctor gives him a zipper in the middle of his body so that his stomach can be opened at any time. Excited and aroused, Caprice kneels in front of him, unzips and performs in a sort of, well, what to call it… cunnilingus stomachus?
David Cronenberg made a lot of great films, “The Fly” of course, “Dead Ringers”, “A History of Violence”. With this small chamber drama horror film, which he wrote twenty years ago but only made into a film now, you don’t really know what he’s getting at. The whole thing remains strangely static and awkward and sometimes unintentionally funny. That shouldn’t be enough for the Palme d’Or.
Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has long warned of an attack on his homeland
The Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, who lives in Berlin, is not in the competition, but is still represented in Cannes with a “Special Screening”. He of all people, the Ukrainian, made a documentary about the air raids on Germany in World War II. The fact that the premiere coincided with the Russian war of aggression against his homeland is of course coincidental, the 57-year-old has been working on the film for three years. But he has also been warning for years that the Russians would attack. His last feature film “Donbass” (2018) about the Russian-Ukrainian border area was already a series of fictional episodes about the political powder keg that this region represents.
Berlin-based Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa depicts destruction from World War II bombing, inspired by WG Sebald.
(Photo: Festival de Cannes)
At first glance, his new documentation has nothing to do with the present. “The Natural History of Destruction” was inspired by the book “Luftkrieg und Literatur” by the German writer WG Sebald. The texts collected in it are based on a lecture that Sebald gave in 1997 at the University of Zurich. “We Germans,” he states in the foreword, are a “conspicuously blind to history and lacking in tradition people.” Sebald criticizes that German post-war literature hardly dealt with the experience of the widespread bombing and destruction of Germany by the Allies.
Sebald’s thesis was widely criticized in the 1990s (and partly refuted, because there are quite a few examples of the bomb war being dealt with in literature). Sergei Loznitsa, however, largely detaches “The Natural History of Destruction” (the book’s English title) from this very domestic German issue of coming to terms with the past. He is concerned with a reconstruction of the historical air raids on Germany in the 1940s, compiled solely from archive material – and that these recordings are almost eerily timeless. Unfortunately.
The film begins in intact German cities, then goes up in the air with shots of the Allies, makes a short trip to the bomb factories and finally lands back down in the landscape of rubble that has emerged. Of course, that was a different war than today, especially since Germany started it itself, but Ukraine was invaded. Above all, Loznitsa is concerned with deriving something universally depressing from these many, many grainy black-and-white and few color shots of military practice: The stupid little man has apparently learned nothing in the past 80 years – and as always, the civilian population has to pay for it.