Dolly de Leon Sails into the Triangle of Sadness

Dolly de Leon at Fantastic Fest (Photo by Heather Kennedy)

If Triangle of Sadness were a conventional Hollywood movie, then audiences could expect influencer/model couple Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) to be the protagonists. But in director Ruben Östlund's savage sociopolitical comedy/commentary, the only proactive figure is kept to the background for much of the mayhem taking place on the luxury yacht on which the duo bob through azure waters. Instead, it's ship's cleaner Abigail, played by Filipino actress Dolly de Leon in her first international production, who puts the pro- into proactive.

That's a trait the character and the performer share. De Leon recalled receiving the synopsis from the producers, and as she read it, "I felt like Abigail was the center of the story, and not the two influencers." Come audition day, "I didn't even think I would be considered, so I just went in there and had fun with it, but when I was part of the shortlist I went, 'OK, there's a little hope.' And that's when I really wanted it, really badly."

Part of the appeal was the opportunity to work with Östlund, a filmmaker notorious for his willingness to cut into deep and universal issues. In Force Majeure, he dissected modern marriages and fragile masculinity; in his follow-up, the Cannes Palme d'Or winner The Square, he savaged contemporary art culture. His latest film focuses on the incompetence of the rich, and that's a theme that resonates with De Leon. There are shades of Bertolt Brecht and, as De Leon noted, Samuel Beckett in Östlund's script, most especially of Waiting for Godot. By simply hoping that someone else will deliver food, rescue, whatever, she said, "You are the cause of your own downfall."

Worse, the feckless rich on the ship are idiotically endangering everyone. There's a key scene in which one of the guests, blithely ignorant of the crew having jobs to do, demands that they stop and have mandatory fun. It's another aspect of abuse of power, the blind condescension to others, that De Leon sees echoed in the treatment of Indigenous peoples. "When the colonizers came to their land, they told them, 'We want to educate you, we want to make you better people, we want you to live better lives, we want to modernize you, because the way you are living is wrong.' But to them, this is their way. They are one with nature, and that's how they want to be. Stop building your buildings and giving us technology. Our land doesn't need that."

She also saw something deliberate in Östlund's decision to make the part of Abigail Southeast Asian – indeed, every time the below-decks crew is seen, they are Black or brown. "I asked him, 'Why did you choose Filipino? Why not any other ethnicity?' And he said that's because that's what he's been witnessing, that we're usually crew members, we're the cleaning staff." Again, De Leon saw how that resonated with the us-versus-them class themes that underlie the story. "Us Filipinos, we're very resilient and hardworking, and very adaptable, and these rich people aren't flexible. So we have a skill that, if you put us in a position of money and power, we can do really well, but they can't manage at the other end of that."

However, there's also a salutary lesson in Abigail about the seductive abuse of power. "She's not after any social justice," De Leon said, "She's only interested in her own survival."

Triangle of Sadness opens in Austin this week. See our review here.