Film releases of the week: »Triangle of Sadness«, »Earwig«, »The Passport Forger«

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Sunnyi Melles as the super rich in »Triangle of Sadness«

Photo: Alamode

In cinemas from October 13th

»Triangle of Sadness«

Swedish director Ruben Östlund's films are like sociological experiments designed at the drawing board, which can take place on many different levels.

One of them is: How long will the art house bubble that judges films at international festivals still appreciate his spectacular, but also easily understandable class war cinema, when will the mood turn against him?

At the moment, the 48-year-old is probably at the zenith of his success: in 2014 he won the jury prize in the side competition in Cannes with »Fraere Majeure«, then in 2017 the Palme d’Or with »The Square« – and this year he received the At the end of his satirical trilogy, he once again received the highest award from the Croisette film festival.

In »Triangle of Sadness« he again pushes people from privileged castes out of their comfort zones and drastically confronts them with the fragility and absurdity of their social certainties.

Here he places an influencer couple (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean, who recently died early) who are struggling with beauty constraints, money problems and gender roles on a luxury cruise ship for the super-rich.

more on the subject

• "Triangle of Sadness" by Ruben Ostlund: Chronicler of our Decadence by Lars-Olav Beier

• Cannes Film Festival Balance Sheet: The Palm of PlatitudeBy Hannah Pilarczyk

• Brutal cinema in Cannes: It's all about the money Hannah Pilarczyk reports from Cannes

The yacht soon finds itself in stormy seas – and thanks to stale gourmet food, the bubble of decadence is thrown back to its most pathetic humanity: cinema has not experienced such an inferno of vomit and faeces since Marco Ferreri’s »Das Große Fessen« (1973).

The Greek chorus is formed by the US captain (Woody Harrelson) and a post-Soviet big businessman, who on the soon-to-be-sinking ship berate each other with quotations from Marx, Lenin and Reagan and engage in a drunken discourse on the system – but the metaphorical »Titanic « of course not save from the inevitable demise.

The brutally nihilistic Grand Guignol culminates in a »Lord of the Flies« scenario in which an Asian,

the cleaning lady (Dolly De Leon), who is still marginalized on the ship, establishes a matriarchy among the stranded - because she is the only one who can catch fish, make fire and cook.

However, there is no escaping capitalism either: if you want to spend the night with her in the warm lifeboat and be fed pretzel sticks, you have to pay with sex.

Östlund's film is hilariously funny and disguises the fact that there is no empathy hidden in this Bermuda Triangle of sadness, only perhaps the heartless calculation of a very clever filmmaker.

»Triangle of Sadness« S, F, D, UK, USA 2022. Written and directed by Ruben Östlund.

With Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean, Woody Harrelson, Sunnyi Melles, Iris Berben, Vicki Berlin

»The Passport Forger«

Sometimes being cheeky is a smart strategy.

In one scene of the film, the hero, a young Jew in Berlin in 1942, sits in an official corridor and sees how two plainclothes police officers check the papers of all petitioners - and instead of waiting until the two have reached him, he jumps up, snaps at the officers and in turn demands that their IDs be presented.

Cioma Schönhaus, played by Louis Hofmann, is a talented imposter in »The Passport Forger« who seems believable even in the role of the high-ranking Nazi henchman.

The parents and grandmother of 19-year-old Cioma were picked up from the Berlin apartment and deported to the extermination camps in the East.

He himself works in an armaments factory and is allowed to stay in the city for the time being.

Together with a friend who is also Jewish (Jonathan Berlin) and a young woman (Luna Wedler), Cioma lets herself be driven through Berlin's nightlife, as if that weren't forbidden by the so-called Aryans, and ignores the danger.

Because he has great talent as a graphic artist, he begins to forge identity papers for a lawyer - for people who want to flee Germany.

Director Maggie Peren tells the true story of the Jew Cioma Schönhaus, who actually escaped the Nazis and lived from 1922 to 2015, in elegiac and sometimes a bit too rich images.

She describes the hero's pursuers, a block warden's widow (Nina Gummig) and a commissioner (André Jung), as differentiated, broken followers;

the Nazi Berlin of the forties shows them as almost today's everyday world without roaring fanatics and pompous symbols of power.

The leading actor, Hofmann, captivates with his glowing charm and is the star in a thoroughly captivating ensemble of fellow actors.

»The passport forger«.

Germany, Luxembourg 2022. Written and directed by Maggie Peren.

With Louis Hofmann, Luna Wedler, Jonathan Berlin, Nina Gummig, André Jung.

116 minutes

In streaming

»Earwig« (from October 15 on Mubi)

Is it because of the confused corona dreams that half the world had collectively in the first months of the pandemic?

In any case, surrealism is experiencing a renaissance and with it its fixation on dreams.

This summer, the Tate Modern hosted the »Surrealism Beyond Borders« exhibition with a focus on the movement beyond Paris, Ben Kingsley recently played the role of Salvador Dalì in a biopic, and the Venice Biennale has until 27 April 2019. November, under the motto »The milk of dreams«, artists from the first heyday of surrealism forgot their big performance.

Seen in this way, »Earwig«, Lucile Hadžihalilović's latest film, fits in perfectly with our times, although the French director, editor and producer has never attempted to catch up with the zeitgeist at any point in her 35-year career.

The images of the Belgian surrealist René Magritte are the best comparison for »Earwig«, Hadžihalilović pulls the film on with such striving precision - and so consistently allows it to tip over into the disturbing.

It begins with a girl (Romane Hemelaers) being cared for in a basic house by a man (Paul Hilton) whose responsibilities include fitting the girl with new teeth made of ice every few hours.

The everyday life of the two is so sparse and sound and light so sparsely used that the first minutes of »Earwig« seem like the deliberate deprivation of sensory impressions.

Once you get used to this sensory minimalism, everything that Hadžihalilović gradually brings into her film is all the more overwhelming: the vastness of a park, the hypnotic shimmer of a crystal glass, the violent outburst of the man who suddenly cuts open the face of a waitress.

»Earwig« does not tell a story in the strict sense, the chronological sequence of the events shown becomes more and more difficult to determine as the story progresses, the relationship between the man and the girl becomes clearer and more blurred at times.

But one shouldn't look for logical connections in a surrealistic work either, but rather trace one's own horrors, desires and fears.

Hadžihalilović's production, supported by extremely precise work on image, sound design and score, offers plenty of opportunity for exactly that.

Film interpretation as a dream interpretation: Here it becomes possible.

»Earwig« BEL, F, UK 2021. Director: Lucile Hadžihalilović.

Book: Geoff Cox, Lucile Hadzihalilović.

Starring Romane Hemelaers, Paul Hilton, Romola Garai, Alex Lawther.

114 minutes