Going to challenge audience to deal with boredom: Palme d’Or winner Ruben Ostlund on next film

By PTI

NEW DELHI: His last film, ‘Triangle of Sadness’, featured a 15-minute vomit scene and with his next, ‘The Entertainment System is Down’, two-time Palme d’Or winner Ruben Ostlund hopes to take his audiences on a ride through boredom.

“I want something to be connected with my brand and it is this: it’s going to be a risk if you go to the cinema,” the Swedish filmmaker, who was announced jury head for the Cannes Film Festival’s 76th edition on Tuesday, told PTI.

In fact, he goes on to add somewhat controversially that he wants his new film, which features an eight-minute segment focused on a child getting bored, to cause the biggest walkout at Cannes.

Cannes audiences are notorious for their extreme reaction to movies which can range from long-standing ovations to straight walkouts.

And Ostlund is actively seeking that extreme reaction by staging the story on a long haul flight with no entertainment system.

“Soon after take-off, passengers get the horrible news that the entertainment system is not working. So when the iPhones and iPads are shorting out, we have modern human beings that have to deal with basically boredom and they’re lost with their own thoughts. And that is something that we human beings tend to see as something horrible. Basically, we don’t like that,” Ostlund told PTI in a virtual interview.

The filmmaker, who started out by making films on skiing and action sports before his feature film debut with “The Guitar Mongoloid” in 2004, shot to international fame with 2014’s “Force Majeure” and 2017’s Palme d’Or-winner “The Square”.

Then came ‘Triangle of Sadness’ in 2022.

“Triangle of Sadness” again won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year and is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars.

If an avalanche is the centrepiece in “Force Majeure”, a monkey imitation act in “The Square” and a storm and resultant seasickness in “Triangle of Sadness”, boredom is the central theme in the next, he said.

Ostlund said he will show an impatient little kid, his big brother and mother on the flight where the entertainment system is down and they have just one iPad.

The little kid wants the iPad and the mother tells him to calm down and wait for eight minutes.

“It’s going to be an anti-climax climax scene. I’m actually going to challenge the audience. I’m going to say to them, ‘okay, you have to deal with boredom now for eight minutes’. So we will have a real time shot when you see this little kid for eight minutes. Like, okay, how much time is left now? Well, now it’s seven minutes and 45 seconds. I think this scene is going to be the biggest walkout in the history of the Cannes Film Festival. That is my goal, at least.”

He wants audiences to associate his brand of movies with some risk.

“There has to be a risk to go to the cinemas. I think that if we’re going to the cinema and we have a collective experience, there has to be a risk involved, like for example, the vomiting in the ‘Triangle of Sadness’. How should I, when I go to the cinema, react. Well, there’s someone sitting next to me, so my reaction is going to be evaluated by that person.”

‘Triangle of Sadness’ will be released across 75 screens in India through Ashwini Kumar Sharma’s Impact Films on March 3 in cities such as Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Goa, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kochi.

The film, the 48-year-old Ostlund said, was born out of a desire to take a deep dive into the world of high fashion, life at a luxury yacht and an island.

He wanted to explore the idea of beauty as a social currency, but reverse the gender gaze.

“My wife is a fashion photographer and she told me about many of the models she is working with. They come from different parts of the society and many of them come from the working class. Beauty for them has been the ticket to travelling across society. Of course, this is a known fact for women because we live in a society where men have the resources,” he said.

Describing the life of male models, who unlike their female counterparts are not at the top of the pyramid, Ostlund said it was interesting to look at it from the “male perspective”.

“I was very interested in looking at our behaviour from this perspective in these times where the image of ourselves is the currency that a lot of us are using. We are using it much more now than we did 10 years ago. I thought it was interesting to look at beauty as a currency in the fashion world, on the yacht and what happens on the deserted island when a cleaning lady who knows how to fish ends up on top of the hierarchy. In fact, a crucial scene in ‘Triangle of Sadness’, where the two characters are fighting over who should pay the restaurant bill, is taken directly from Ostlund’s own life when he first met his wife.

Terming sociology his favourite subject, Ostlund said he is dealing with set ups that are similar to sociology where there are two or more choices but none of them are easy.

“If I look at my own life, these dilemmas are connected with gender expectations. So how does the culture expect me to be as a man. What happens when I say I don’t want to pay the bill at a restaurant even though the gender expectation is that I should. These are conflicts that I myself have had with the culture. I want to be free but I don’t feel free.”

Any interview on ‘Triangle of Sadness’, which in the modelling world refers to the area between the eyebrows, is incomplete without talking about the chaotic scene filled with vomiting guests and a broken sewage system. Amid all the fine dining, chaos and storm, Woody Harrelson’s Marxist captain engages in a rousing discussion on communism with a Russian businessman.

Ostlund said it was a hard scene to shoot and his crew fell seasick while working for eight hours on a rocking set but he enjoyed putting the ideological discussion in the middle of it.

“What I enjoyed a lot while I was writing the film was to go into these two different ideologies. These two different forces, when I was brought up in the ’80s, were bashing their heads against each other. It was socialism and individualism and neoliberalism on one side. I have, as a Swede, constantly navigated myself through these two different ideologies and my mother is a left wing, she still considered herself a communist,” he recalled.

While ideological discussions were a huge part of his life growing up, he felt that “we have left this world behind” now.

“Now we have stopped being fans of an ideology. But it felt like when the conflict with Russia and Ukraine happened, all of a sudden the world was in the west and an eastern perspective again, in some ways. But I love to go into these old quotes by (Ronald) Reagan and (Margaret) Thatcher and Lenin and Marx and see what they actually say. And to play around with this.”

In fact, he goes on to add somewhat controversially that he wants his new film, which features an eight-minute segment focused on a child getting bored, to cause the biggest walkout at Cannes.googletag.cmd.push(function() {googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-8052921-2’); });