52 Films by Women Vol 8. 22. Club Zero (Director: Jessica Hausner)
There is a case to be made that Austrian-born Jessica
Hausner is one of the best writer-directors working in cinema today. Certainly she
is the equal of her much-fêted compatriot Michael Haneke. Hausner’s films are
about transgressors and ideas who are portrayed through a neutral lens. Her
films aren’t about sex. Rather they are preoccupied with liberal guilt. We
should do more for each other and ourselves or else we are doomed. Her message
might be shortened to, ‘we are doomed’.
Club Zero, which premiered at the 2023 Cannes
Film Festival and has been released worldwide incrementally with little fanfare
and certainly no awards heat, concerns itself with the politics of
over-consumption. Hausner doesn’t fat shame. Rather she focuses on a course in
nutrition taught at an English private school – one with a European clientele –
that goes awry.
Ms Novak (Mia Wasikowska) is an advocate of ‘conscious
eating’. She markets a slimming tea that bears her face on it and attracts a
class of seven pupils (two of whom later drop out) who are encouraged to follow
her teaching. ‘Conscious eating’ is described by the school’s headmistress, Ms
Dorset (Sidse Babett Knudsen) as ‘the latest thing’, though where this
reputation came from is unclear. One of the parents describes hearing about Ms
Novak ‘from the internet’.
Right from the outset, Hausner cues us – albeit very subtly
– that the film we are watching isn’t realistic. Rather, it is a performance. Hausner
replaces the school bell, used to signify the call to the next class, with the
sound made to call an audience back into the theatre after an intermission.
Hausner also uses this sound in context so that we are absolutely clear about
this intention. Nothing in her film is there by accident; Hausner, her
co-screenwriter Géraldine Bajard, composer Markus Binder, cinematographer Martin
Gschlacht, costume designer Tanja Hausner and the rest of her creative team, make
deliberate, highly stylised choices that serve the central idea that she is
operating on the level of fable, one that focuses us to conclude that there is
no such conclusive proof of what we should do, only what we might do.
The film opens with an overhead shot looking down from an angle of three round tables, organised in relation to one another in a triangular shape. Ms Novak’s class of seven pupils filter in from the right and remove the tables to organise their chairs in a (more egalitarian) circle. The camera then moves from right to left tracking round and past each pupil as they explain their reasons for joining Ms Novak’s course. These range from protecting the environment, being better at sports (rejecting additives) to improving PHSE scores, the latter offered by outsider Ben Benedict (Samuel D Anderson). Ms Novak explains that conscious eating will help them in all the ways suggested, being in the business of truly agreeing that there are no wrong answers. She then is spoken to by Ms Dorset, who is encouraged to try her tea. ‘Our children are extremely talented, or so their parents tell us,’ Ms Dorset informs us, by way of providing a caveat. ‘We have a motto: There must be more in us.’ She adds that the children are extremely impressionable but also competitive. The school is named the Talent Campus and has a second motto: we reach out for the stars. Later, we hear the choir, all in shorts, sing the two mottos combined, over and over, as if repetition gives the phrases truth. Ms. Dorset encourages Ms. Novak to take up the weekend duty, looking after pupils who don’t go home. Ms Novak is happy to do so.
Two of the pupils are shown in their home environment at mealtime.
Ragna’s father (Lukas Tutur) explains how Ms Novak was hired and patronisingly
asks the ponytailed Ragna (Florence Baker) to ‘explain it to us.’ ‘It’s really
kind of simple,’ she sighs, putting a small morsel of food on her fork, raising
it slowly to her lips and blowing on it. Elsa’s father (Mathieu Demy) is
somewhat more aggressive. The refusal of Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt) to eat food is
viewed problematically. At one point, he tells her to ‘eat the damned sausage’.
Elsa, who wears a green hairband and matching green necklace throughout most of
the film, sneaks off to the toilet after dinner to vomit up her food. Her
mother (Elsa Zylberstein) who winks at her at the dinner table, also has an
issue with food, something that inflames Elsa’s father. Both Ragna and Elsa
will approach Ms Novak and ask about the people who reportedly survive just on
sunlight. ‘That’s a bit esoteric, don’t you think?’ Ms Novak responds, the
latter phrase ‘don’t you think’ landing heavily, more as an accusation. Ms
Novak doesn’t know about such people. Rather, she stresses the process of
self-nourishment known as autophagy. Subsequently, she reveals that she is a
member of an elite group, known as Club Zero, who don’t eat at all. ‘We are
small in number, but growing,’ assures Ms Novak, confidentially, though how she
knows this isn’t clear. As we later discover still, Ms Novak worships a flower
and pleads for the opportunity to ‘prove she can do it’. She is, as they say,
off her trolley.
Pictured: Meet the conscious eaters of the film 'Club Zero', directed by Jessica Hausner. Left (from back to front): Fred (Luke Barker), Ragna (Florence Baker), Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt). Right (from back to front): Helen (Gwen Currant) and Ben (Samuel D. Anderson). Still courtesy of Co-Production Office / BAC Films.
The bespectacled Helen (Gwen Currant) isn’t shown to pursue
conscious eating problematically. However, two of the other members of the
group experience difficulties. Fred (Luke Barker), a talented dancer with a
tattoo on his neck showing roots of a plant reaching to his chin, is
geographically separated from his parents and young brother Seth, who are living
in Ghana. Like the other parents in the film, Fred’s moustachioed father (Sam
Hoare) and earnest mother (Camilla Rutherford) are the objects of satire,
somewhat over concerned about ‘the project’, as if it were the top priority
over and above their family. ‘I’m sorry we can’t come home,’ Fred’s father
tells him. Fred is described by his parents as ‘difficult’, though this may be
an oblique reference to his appearance – he also wears eyeliner. Ben attends
conscious eating classes but is happy to purchase and consume a Nibbli Bar. We
see a vending machine entirely filled with one product rather than offering a
range of treats. The Nibbli Bar is fictitious confectionary that signifies
every chocolate and candy bar on the market. The conscious eaters despise it
and tell Ben that he will fail the course. We learn that If he succeeds, he’ll
get a full scholarship. His mother (Amanda Lawrence) is circumspect. ‘It
doesn’t matter’, she tells him, adding that it would appear that private school
is ‘not for the likes of us.’
The students form a clique at their dining table, taking
food, cutting it up but only pretending to eat It - that is, raising a morsel
to their lips, then putting it back down again, scraping it off their fork.
‘You’re not going to eat that, are you?’ Elsa is asked. Hausner cuts to a shot
showing three potato wedges on Elsa’s plate. Elsa slices one of them into small
pieces but doesn’t eat. In another scene, the students simulate the process of consuming
a full meal, down to tasting the dessert, a stodgy current bun with a cherry on
top, the icing dribbling down the side. It is sad and wasteful pantomime, down
to scraping whole meals from their segmented green trays into the bin – the
opposite of ecological best practice.
Markus Binder’s score suggests an accompaniment to Noh
Theatre. At some points, it consists of drums and sharp clangs, at others, it
follows the same pattern as the humming that Ms Novak teaches to her class.
‘Hum, hum, hum (pause) homme,’ the latter at bass level. There are moments when
it speeds up. Its spare nature suggests the diet that the children follow,
first a plant-based meal, and then when Club Zero kicks in, nothing at all. Or
rather they eat then vomit. In a later scene, one of the girls consumes a
cherry dessert, the vomited version of which is discovered in a Tupperware
container under her bed.
The school only takes against Ms Novak after she accompanies
Fred to the opera, having bonded with him during weekend duty and showing him
her favourite picture, a landscape, in her room. Fred starts missing ballet
practice to the extent that his dance tutor Mr Dahl (Amir El-Masry) interrupts
one of Ms Novak’s lessons. Performing the ballet ‘Peter and the Wolf’, Fred is
required to pick a flower, not dissimilar to the one worshipped by Ms Novak and
referred to as ‘Mighty Mother’. The two of them have a bond to such an extent
that Fred stops himself from kissing one of the girls because he thinks he can
smell food on her breath. (‘You’ve been eating, haven’t you?’) This after the
pair sway slowly to the song, ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’, in a shared moment
that suggests possible romance, though Hausner is quick to diffuse any
suggestion of erotic attraction.
Before Ms Novak is suspended for fraternising with Fred,
which is strictly against school rules, there is a montage of Fred’s ballet,
Ragna on her trampoline and Elsa playing the piano. Ms Novak whispers to Mr
Dahl that she wishes Fred’s parents could see him perform. However, the triumph
is short-lived as Fred collapses owing to lack on insulin. Even though he
follows Ms Novak’s teaching he should continue to take his injections. It is
this near miss that casts a spotlight on her work; even Fred’s father visits
him in hospital. The parent governor
committee meets to discuss Ms Novak, with Ragna’s father nominally encouraging
any parents to speak in her defence. None do so.
Pictured: Conscious eaters Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt) and Helen (Gwen Currant) in a scene from the film, 'Club Zero', co-written (with Géraldine Bajard) and directed by Jessica Hausner. Still courtesy of Co-Production Office / BAC Films
Ms Novak’s suspension doesn’t end Club Zero. The children carry on fasting in secret, convinced that by eating no food they will be saved. The film builds to Christmas Day and family sequences set to Silent Night, during which the parents – and a maid – make a series of alarming discoveries.
Much of the film is darkly humorous. The conversation about
Ms Novak’s transgression hinges on confusion about whether she took Fred to the
opera or the theatre, as if one were excusable, the other not. In one scene,
the comedy is replaced by horror. Elsa
complains that if the food companies told us to eat vomit, we would do so. To
illustrate the point, she makes herself sick, then dips a fork in a pool of
green spew and starts to eat. Her parents are naturally appalled. Some of the
comedy is physical and costume related, Ms Benedict arriving at Ragna’s parents
house wearing a yellow hat and a furry, bee-like jacket, which she hands to the
waiting maid. Her awkwardness is alarmingly apparent. She is the source of
drier humour, putting biscuits into a tin marked ‘Ben’s Delights’.
Hausner’s use of plain colours is striking. Ms Novak wears
an orange button-up ‘Fred Perry’ style tee shirt and red trousers. The school
uniform is yellow and purple. Hausner’s colour palette is minimalist. The
school itself has two logos, one a figure reaching up (reflected in its ‘reach
for the stars’ motto), the other is the letter ‘G’ with the curves of the
letter replaced by right angles, so the line suggests a maze reaching a
dead-end.
Hausner parodies the earnestness of the parents or, more
accurately, their desire to appear to be liberal, albeit whilst one family
employs a maid. One family’s dog, seen perched on a sofa in one scene,
understands the situation a lot faster than its owners.
There is a question whether Ms Novak’s teachings amount to a
religion. By the end, some of the parents wonder whether they too should follow
her. Helen, seated at the centre of the frame, tells them that they have to
have faith; the final composition over which the end credits are projected is a
parody of the painting, ‘The Last Supper’.
Like the work of Michael Haneke and Luis Buñuel, Hausner’s films
belong to the cinema of cruelty. Unpleasant things happen against which there
is no corrective. Buñuel said that he didn’t attempt to present solutions to
the problems of the world; ‘to do so would seem like cheating.’ Hausner adopts
a similar approach. The criticism levelled at Hausner is that her points are
rather obvious, that she has nothing new to say about the cult of slimming. It
is noteworthy that Hausner never once mentions weight loss being driven by a
desire to be more attractive to a man for the purpose of seeking a (preferable
wealthy) life partner. Hausner never genders her critique. In the final
analysis, attributing radical diets to the pressures placed on women by
patriarchy would be obvious; Hausner is markedly less so. Her artistry is
particular evident when she brings a painting to life. We aren’t immediately
aware of the point at which Ms Novak and her class enter the landscape, mainly
because we are focused on the tree at the centre of the frame. This optical
trick has never failed to fool me in three viewings of the film over a
thirteen-month period, suggesting that critics overlook Hausner’s skill.
Reviewed at Palais Des Festivals, Cannes, Tuesday 23 May
2023, 14:00 screening; Cinema City, Westfield Shopping Centre, Warsaw, Tuesday
27 February 2024, 21:45 screening; Palace Cinema Screen Four, Brussels, Friday
7 June 2024, 11:45am screening
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