Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  The spiralling overhead shot that begins Jessica Hausner’s film, Little Joe , introduces us to the central clash in the director’s first English language feature, between the colours blue and red. Blue is the colour of the flower ‘Flash Two’, a thriving species. Red is the colour of the flower bred by Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham), a carrot-haired, buttoned-up floriculturist, who has created a plant that ‘requires warmth, cold and talking to’ but emits a scent that will make people happy ‘as a reward for all that hard work’. Hoping to enter it into an upcoming flower fair, Alice brings a sample home and keeps it under a blue lamp, calling it ‘Little Joe’, Joe being the name of her schoolboy son (Kit Connor). She is separated from Joe’s father, Ivan (Sebastian H ü lk) who lives ‘in the wild’. (The dialogue is sometimes stilted.) Alice has a colleague, Chris (Ben Whishaw) who admires her work. They share the same taste in plain clothes, though unlike Alice, Chris’s shirts have a ...

  Pictured : Would you die for your loved one? Henriette ( Birte Schnöink) considers this question in A ustrian director Jessica Hausner 's black comedy, ' Amour Fou '. Still courtesy of coop 99. Writers – usually men - often tell us that women can’t do comedy, an accusation that is the product of selective amnesia. Mae West, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Lily Tomlin, Diane Keaton, Whoopi Goldberg, Tina Fey and Amy Schumer are just a few – a smidgen - of Hollywood funny women. In Britain, we treasure Dora Bryan, Miriam Karlin, Victoria Wood, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Meera Syal and Miranda Hart. I haven’t even begun on the writers.   The number of women comedy directors, though, is somewhat fewer. In Hollywood, directors Dorothy Arzner (at a push), Amy Heckerling, Penny Marshall, Nancy Meyers and Elizabeth Banks are exclusively associated with light comedy. In Britain, we have Debbie Isitt ( Confetti, Nativity ) and Mandie Fletcher ( Deadly Advice ). No studio is goin...

Pictured : Students at the Talent Campus practice 'conscious eating' in a scene from Jessica Hausner 's 2023 film, ' Club Zero '. (Still: Coop 99 ) Over the period 1 November 2023 and 31 October 2024, I watched and reflected upon a further fifty-two fiction films directed by women. 28 of these films had American finance. Six could be classed as British films. Three were French, a surprisingly low number given the number of French auteurs currently working. Two had Indian subjects, if not finance. Two were Belgian, another two Canadian (one in French, the other English). The remaining nine films were from Australia, Austria, Brazil, China, Denmark, Germany, Morocco, Netherlands and Spain. Of the fifty-two, three movies officially grossed more than $100 million (either superhero sequels or spin-offs, namely Venom: The Last Dance , The Marvels and Madame Web ). One ( Yolo ) unofficially grossed this sum; Box Office Mojo does not offer reliable figures on Chinese movie...

Pictured : Ms Novak ( Mia Wasikowska ) sashays through the Talent Academy in a scene from the comedy-drama, ' Club Zero ', directed by Jessica Hausner from a screenplay by Hausner and  Géraldine Bajard . Still courtesy of Coproduction Office / BAC Films 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...