“Without filter”: the palm and the bile

Parade of pecs and abs. Hairless biscotos, radiant smiles. “Without Filter” opens during a casting of male models. Perfect body among perfect bodies, Carl is already worn out. Indeed, it sports, just between the eyebrows, the very small wrinkles of the “triangle of sadness” (“Triangle of Sadness”, original title of the film). Carl has reached the age of botox, the antechamber of the scrapping of handsome kids. His companion Yaya remains a star of the parades. However, she too sees her end coming. Her destiny, she says, is that of a “trophy wife” for a millionaire. Already she has become an influencer on social networks, with Carl as a stooge. Are they a couple or a small business? Do they love each other or are they in love with the smooth image that their duo projects on smartphones? They don’t know any more than we do. They are the product and the reflection of an era of appearances.

The sheaf titanic

In the next chapter, we find them aboard a luxury yacht. Invited by a cruise line, Carl and Yaya are the youngest, the most beautiful and the poorest on the crossing. Passengers include: a Russian manure tycoon oligarch; a tech mogul or even a retired couple who made their fortune selling grenades and anti-personnel mines, in the good old days when UN paperwork did not hinder their activity. At the helm stands an alcoholic and disillusioned captain played by Woody Harrelson. The sequel is awaited: a well-placed storm will transform “Without Filter” into an extraordinary disaster film.

And sail the ship of puke! The Titanic of the sheaf! The adventure of the Poseidon of the chiasse! In a deluge of fluids, hurricanes of oysters, swells of caviar and gusts of badly digested champagne spurt out. Before our bewildered eyes, “Without Filter” regurgitates the guts of the famous 1%. It’s no longer a ship, but a monster that stinks, burps and gurgles the intestines of the global economy… Everything will end on a desert island where the castaways will build a surprising society.

On the edge of the abyss

After “The Square”, his satire of the art world, Ruben Östlund launches a new Molotov cocktail in the window of the XXI^e century. “Without Filter” turns out to be just as incendiary as the Swedish rebel’s previous gold medal. More classic in style, it is also aimed at a wider audience. His aesthetic is indeed eyeing Belgian comics. Östlund draws his frames like boxes, always with a slight imbalance, enclosing in each shot a small world on the edge of the abyss.

Insolent, excessive and hilarious, “Without Filter” also offers a great film of dialogues which offers its actors long exchanges worthy of a badminton championship. Thus, in the first part, this Dantesque household scene around a restaurant bill that continues into an elevator. Through his heroes, the filmmaker continues to undress masculinity, to dig into men’s flaws behind the curtain of virility.

Like all satirists, Östlund is also a moralist. He looks like Arcimboldo. This Milanese painter, precursor of the surrealists, enjoyed success in the 1570s with his portraits in which the faces of the great lords were made up of vegetables and other plants. Grotesque figures which, by their very nature, bore the germ of their decay, the first cracks in the triangle of sadness.