Wealth, corruption and immorality are under intense scrutiny in a clutch of films being released this autumn
At the end of March 2020, the billionaire David Geffen posted images from the Grenadines of Rising Sun, his 454ft, $400m superyacht, accompanied by a message reassuring the world that he was “avoiding the virus” and “hoping everybody is staying safe”. The post resulted in a barrage of replies. One said: “It’s like he wants to be first on the list for when the peasants revolt.” Others, which were accompanied by the hashtag #EatTheRich, forced him to change his Instagram settings to private.
Around the same time, lockdown and quarantine restrictions were interrupting production on Ruben Östlund’s comedy Triangle of Sadness (for UK release on 28 October), in which a luxury yacht captained by a sozzled Marxist (played by Woody Harrelson) is shipwrecked on a desert island. Here, the social order is upended, placing power and agency in the hands of those who were previously lowest on the pecking order; the stinking rich and the disgustingly beautiful (including Harris Dickinson as a frowning model and Charlbi Dean as his influencer girlfriend) are now subject to the whims of the cleaner (Dolly De Leon), who is the only one among them with any survival skills. “Rich people are nice,” says Östlund, who shot the yacht scenes on board the Christina O. “They just don’t want to pay taxes.”
