Divisive Swedish satire on super-rich wins top prize at Cannes film festival

Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness, an uproarious satire on the super-rich, featuring projectile vomiting, gurgling human effluent and inversion of the classes, has won the Palme d’Or at an unusually contentious 75th Cannes film festival. Virtually every title in the competition turned critic against critic. Triangle of Sadness, concerning a luxury cruise that goes dangerously wrong screened to howls of enthusiastic laughter (some surely appreciating the irony of such a film playing next to a veritable flotilla of billion-dollar yachts), but it also had its fair share of unconvinced reviews. The Swedish director explained that it “ends on an island where we are going to see how the models use their looks as currency throughout. It is going to be the end of the western civilisation.” Woody Harrelson plays the Marxist captain of the yacht.

Having won the Palme d’Or for The Square in 2017, Östlund now becomes the ninth director to win that prize twice, joining Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Haneke and the Dardenne brothers, who received a special 75th anniversary prize for their characteristically gritty drama Tori and Lokita. Nobody has won a third.

The Grand Prix, essentially the silver medal, was split between Lukas Dhont’s Close, an enormously moving tale of a fracturing childhood friendship, and Claire Denis’s profoundly puzzling Stars at Noon. No film was more squabbled over than that last title. Starring Margaret Qualley and Joe Alwyn as lovers adrift in Nicaragua, it was greeted with some scathing snorts at its press screening, but won a smattering of good reviews from senior critics.

Vincent Lindon, respected French actor, presided over a competition jury that also included English actor and director Rebecca Hall, Norwegian director Joachim Tier and Swedish actor Noomi Rapace. Their diplomatic prizes spread the wealth among nations, generations and styles. Park Chan Wook, veteran Korean director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden, took best director for his complex neo-noir Decision to Leave. Zahra Amir Ebrahimi won best actress for playing an Iranian journalist on the hunt for a serial killer in Ali Abbasi’s gripping Holy Spider. Song Kang Ho, the Korean actor who was so impressive in Palme d’Or winner Parasite, took best actor for playing a benign scoundrel in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Broker. The jury prize was split between Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO, tale of a wandering donkey, and Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s Alpine drama The Eight Mountains.

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Thus ended an event that, if not a classic, was notable for an apparent return to normality after the Covid years. Tom Cruise energised the first week with the launch of Top Gun: Maverick. Baz Luhrmann’s biopic Elvis made noise in week two. There were celebrations further down the Presley family tree. Riley Keough, Elvis’s granddaughter, working with co-director Gina Gammell, won the Camera d’Or, the prize for best first film, for her tough drama War Pony and, on Friday, appeared on video to accept the Palm Dog, hosted in a beachside bar, on behalf of that film’s canine star. That jokey bash has, for 21 years, been a herald of an imminent end to festivities.