At this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival, blame it on the vagaries of programming, but on one day two films featured such egregious abuse of the body, as if to highlight human excesses of all kinds. I speak of copious consumption of junk food, fine champagne to wash down, and then up projectile vomit, and consequent brown spewing toilets. A coincidence?
In Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, Brendan Fraser plays Charlie, a dying obese man. That’s too bad because he also appreciates his estranged daughter (Sadie Sink), and poetry, the true meaning of self in Whitman’s Song of Myself and the rhythmic cadences of Melville’s Moby Dick, about an obsessed sea captain on a death wish. In case you ever wondered how people can eat themselves to oblivion, you may find the answer here, but a whole lot more. As the classic literature suggests a spiritual component to the sins of the flesh, Charlie consumes pizza, meatball heroes with extra cheese, you name it. As a visual experience, it is painful to see him move around his drab, depressing apartment—until he achieves the transcendence he seeks.
Woody Harrelson is so chill in Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness as a sea captain on a luxury yacht, his character is a satire all his own. Does the captain go down with his ship? You bet, as do the champagne swigging swells who experience sea sickness as you’ve never seen it before, in glorious tones of brown. Who can forget the image of one diamond bedecked lady swishing along the floor, anchored by her commode, clad only in a flesh-toned teddy? Survivors get to a nearby deserted island, sunbathed, turquoise—you get the picture. A young couple, two professional models, make it, alive. And then the transactional tables flip when one of the help staff turns bossy. Skilled at cleaning toilets, she’s doubly great at fishing and making fires—a valuable resource for existence. She knows her place in this “algebra of need.” Let’s say, neither your money nor your good looks are good here, in this paradise.
Comments