A luxury yacht cruising the Mediterranean.

The passengers lounge in the sun, the crew toils below deck, the captain is holed up in his cabin.

A Russian billionaire boasts that he will buy the ship tomorrow.

An English couple tells of their profits in the hand grenade business.

A bather asks the waitress to sit in the pool in her place.

And a woman in a wheelchair keeps repeating the same three words: “In the clouds.

In the clouds."

Andrew Kilb

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Then a storm comes up.

The crew serves the dinner as scheduled, but the guests are no longer able to enjoy the treats.

One after the other gets up from the table and falls on the railing or throws up straight onto his plate.

Meanwhile, the captain and the oligarch are drinking from the on-board bar and cracking jokes about Marx and Lenin.

The light goes out.

The toilets are overflowing.

But the next morning the sky is clear again.

Except now there's a pirate boat lurking on the horizon.

Guns are loaded, grenades drawn, the English couple gets to feel the penetrating power of their products.

Finally, an explosion tears the ship apart.

The survivors save themselves on an island.

The captain is not among them.

But a cleaning lady.

The Swede Ruben Östlund won the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2017 with the satire "The Square".

In his film "Triangle of Sadness" he takes the global class society just as seriously as he made fun of the art market in "The Square".

But before he takes us to the island of the coming day, he plays a little doomsday.

The camera says goodbye to each passenger who falls off the chair puking.

That takes a lot of cinema time.

Of the two and a half hours that “Triangle of Sadness” lasts, two thirds are foreplay, only then does the film get down to business.

Because the cleaning lady who saved herself from the sinking yacht in the dinghy is the only one on the island who can catch fish and make a fire.

She quickly leads the way among the survivors.

One of the passengers, Carl, is a fashion model.

The new boss makes him her lover under the eyes of his girlfriend.

As a reward, she feeds the rest of the troupe pretzel sticks from her supplies.

When another passenger manages to kill a donkey that got lost in the thicket, the post-socialist Robinson idyll is almost perfect.

In the cinema, impact is a question of economy.

In Ruben Östlund's narrative economy gets so out of hand that one feels reminded of one of those festivals that start too late and then don't want to end.

Nevertheless, his film received a minute-long ovation at the Cannes premiere.

Among the critics who give their ratings in the industry magazine "Screen", "Triangle of Sadness" is considered the price favorite, which the god of the palm trees may prevent.

After all, Östlund's work is so far the film with the most visible German participation in the Cannes competition.

In a bathing suit, Sunnyi Melles dances a wild pas-de-deux with decadence, and Iris Berben, as a woman in a wheelchair, plays one of those supporting roles that are not easily forgotten.