Critic’s Notebook: Looking for Connections in a Less-Than-Dazzling Cannes Lineup
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film CriticThis year, the Cannes Film Festival kicked off with a restoration of Jean Eustache’s 1973 ménage à trois scandal “The Mother and the Whore” and concluded with a screening of controversial Palme d’Or winner “Triangle of Sadness,” creating an odd kind of symmetry for the event’s 75th anniversary edition, between which I somehow managed to screen all 21 films in competition.
Made half a century apart, Eustache and Östlund’s rhyming triangles were hardly the only parallels to be found at Cannes — though anyone who’s ever binge-watched movies at a major festival knows the feeling of such connections, often just a fluke of the order in which you see movies whose images and ideas inevitably resonate with one another.
Consider this could-be coincidence: Roughly midway through Östlund’s influencer-skewering satire (a fitting follow-up to 2018 Palme d’Or winner “The Square”), a black-tie dinner aboard a posh ocean cruise goes sideways, touching off an outrageous sequence in which the disgraced attendees, puking every which way, wind up swimming in their own effluvia.
Until this point, “Triangle” presents itself largely in aspirational mode, poking pinholes in the characters’ rarefied bubble.
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