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Rating:
She embraces her boyfriend as they leave the cinema so excited that in her continuous bouncing, her pretty breasts and tight buttocks encased in a pair of strictly ripped 200 euro jeans jiggle. I like that bouncing, I am puzzled by her behavior as I watch her and scratch my beard. She has just witnessed a work that takes aim precisely at those insipid human beings like her, her muscular companion, myself, and the whole of Western civilization, with particular reference to the world of radical chic that crowds art house cinemas. Useless and arrogant people who worry about nonsense, who go to the bathroom with their cell phones in hand and who have no awareness of the weight of their actions and what it means to live for billions of people. People who don't know how to unscrew a light bulb and yet want to give themselves a certain air and appear better than they actually are; and so they spend hours exacerbating the false and unsustainable way of presenting themselves until they reach and surpass the ridiculous. For heaven's sake, it is now very fashionable to criticize the excesses and contradictions of capitalism with acrid and caustic provocations and Östlund's film is quite entertaining but it tremendously recalls Parasite without reaching its heights. I close my eyes and review the two and a half hours divided into three parts.
The first flash is represented by the initial scene that reminds me, on the verge of plagiarism, of Ben Stiller ("Zoolander") engaged in producing the new Magnum.
The second image is represented by the river of vomit and shit that covers the luxurious cruise ship. It brings to mind the binge in "Meaning of Life" by the Monty Python when the customer, after having devoured the entire restaurant menu, literally explodes. All due to a damned and thin mint.
The third flash brings to mind "Swept Away" with the class struggle magnificently interpreted by Giannini and Melato.
The problem with the work is that I don't see genius and originality, but rather craft. In the first part, the discussion between the leading couple is interesting: Östlund plays on the fact that in high fashion it is probably the only job where models earn a better salary than their male colleagues. Their relationship is as ephemeral and insubstantial as their beauty: it rests solely on a false story to prostitute on Instagram. I don't see originality in the second section of the work, which represents the disgusting opulence/consumerism of capitalism with a copious river of vomit and shit in which the characters we meet on the cruise drown. Extreme figures, and this, paradoxically, greatly blunts the impact and makes the critique less sharp. The survivors, children/adults unaware of how reality functions, finally find themselves in a situation that wakes them up and forces them to become aware of their uselessness and inability to optimize resources even in an emergency situation (cf. scene of the useless killing of a donkey).
The concluding part is scrappy and disappointing with an apparent return to the initial situation and one then wonders what the sense of 140 minutes is. At times funny and irreverent but repetitive and with very slow rhythms that make an appealing and cunning work lose its bite, taking on the features of a missed opportunity.
Note: the leading actress Charlbi Dean (32) recently died in a New York hospital from a sudden illness.
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