Club Zero Review: Jessica Hausner’s Caustic Satire of Consumption and Wellness Culture

Few sacred cows emerge unscathed from Hausner’s latest.

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Club Zero
Photo: Film Movement

Few sacred cows emerge unscathed from director Jessica Hausner’s Club Zero. No matter where audiences sit on the political spectrum, they’re liable find something discomfiting, if not enraging, in the film. Hausner and co-writer Géraldine Bajard can be applauded for the inclusivity of their derision, which is hostile to all forms of complacency. Then again, maybe it’s too easy to toss people and ideas so indiscriminately into the vat of irony while defending nothing, potentially leaving the viewer at a tiresome, cynical impasse.

This caustic satire follows a group of students at a private high school who sign up for a nutrition course taught by Ms. Novak (Mia Wasikowska), who’s hired at the recommendation of the parent board. Ms. Novak teaches—or rather, preaches—the doctrine of “conscious eating.” Each student has their reasons for enrolling: Helen (Gwen Currant) to protect the environment by cutting down on consumption, Ragna (Florence Baker) to reduce her body fat and improve her fitness, Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt) to practice self-control, Fred (Luke Barker) to fashion a more sustainable lifestyle, and Ben (Samuel D Anderson) to keep his scholarship.

Cribbing freely from New Age jargon, mindfulness culture, and nutritional pseudoscience, Ms. Novak urges her pupils to eat less and less, as a means of setting themselves apart from parents and peers alike. She gets her more enthusiastic disciples to cajole the skeptics (in particular Ben, who comes from a poorer background) into propounding her ideas. The class begins to resemble a cult, with Ms. Novak as its guru. Eventually, she reveals that with her guidance, they can attain membership of Club Zero, a clandestine group that subsists on pure faith.

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The sumptuous stylization of Hausner’s other films, like Little Joe, is slightly toned down here. The camerawork draws less attention to itself, while the costuming, set design, and color palette are striking for their anti-aesthetic qualities. Acid yellow, often paired with a vomit-toned beige, pervades the mise-en-scène, from the students’ uniforms to the foliage in a landscape painting hanging in Ms. Novak’s apartment (it’s her “favorite place in the world,” because she, of course, prefers representation over the world of material things). The thematic heft of this palette becomes obvious in the third act as malnutrition sets in and the disciples’ faces grow sallow.

Hausner’s meticulous shot compositions, meanwhile, emphasize the school’s minimalist architecture, reminding us that minimalism—not the absence of style but stylized absence—is rarely inconspicuous. The same goes for asceticism. Both are only discernable against a backdrop of excess. Visually, the film supplies excess with overhead shots of dishes that wouldn’t be out of place in a cooking show like Chef’s Table, most of them lovingly cooked by Ben’s mother (Amanda Lawrence). Meanwhile, Markus Binder’s stunning score, with its non-Western instrumentation and chord progressions, borrows from the trance-inducing drone and repetition of minimal music. This in turn stands in contrast to the film’s exaggerated chewing sounds, some of the queasiest Foley effects of food since Peter Strickland’s Flux Gourmet.

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Club Zero doesn’t attempt a sensitive depiction of eating disorders. Given the satiric nature of Hausner and Bajard’s screenplay, its characters are broadly drawn types whom Martin Gschlacht’s camera regards with detachment. If it were too sympathetic, the film would probably come off as a tragedy. Even so, its plot developments show how discipline and neglect at home, combined with a culture of hypercompetition at school, make the students vulnerable to fanaticism. Club Zero takes as a given that both sites are microcosms of capital.

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It’s conceivable to read Club Zero as reactionary, for the way it pokes fun at the overlap between leftist cliques and cults of asceticism, or anyone laying claim to some liberatory, utopian ideal. Though Ms. Novak, unlike her disciples, never exhibits signs of malnutrition, the script leaves little room for ambiguity as to whether, in the fictional world of the film, faith really can replace food. Still, it’s clear that Club Zero’s sympathies lie with materialism, but not in the pejorative sense. Eating disorders and cultism alike are portrayed as symptoms of a morbid status quo.

For all her talk of protecting the environment and resisting capitalism, Ms. Novak’s doctrine remains rooted in consumerism. The filmmakers fascinatingly frame her version of mindfulness as a luxury: disdain of consumption as a mode of conspicuous consumption. Asceticism only registers as such when it’s a choice—otherwise it’s plain-old impoverishment. Meanwhile, the satire of the film can be seen as taking aim at a Western commodification of Eastern philosophical traditions, rather than the traditions themselves.

Club Zero’s climax takes place around Christmastime, and while this detail may be incidental to the plot, it carries a strong thematic resonance. The connotations of feasting and rampant consumerism are obvious, but the film also teases out the conspiratorial, ascetic origins of Christianity, with its 12 apostles and ethic of poverty. The sect-style organization of faith that’s singled out for particular excoriation, though, may represent less of a threat than ideology, which doesn’t even require that people believe in anything specific, only behave as if they did, out of convenience, resignation, conformity, cynicism, or the lack of a more satisfying ideology.

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With the film’s sucker punch of a final shot—a recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper—Hausner reveals a curious symbiosis between fanaticism and ideology, which at first blush seem opposed to one another. Cults of personality, in no way inimical to, but dependent on, the excesses of capital, prop up the very status quo that they claim to resist. As long as grouplets of the self-righteous are willing to mortify their flesh for our sins, we can go on sinning with a free conscience. Hausner may never hint at a more potent form of resistance, but her startling discovery of this baked-in hypocrisy more than compensates.

Score: 
 Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Florence Baker, Luke Barker, Ksenia Devriendt, Samuel D Anderson, Amanda Lawrence, Elsa Zylberstein  Director: Jessica Hausner  Screenwriter: Jessica Hausner, Géraldine Bajard  Distributor: Film Movement  Running Time: 110 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2023  Buy: Video

William Repass

William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. For links to his published writing, click here.

1 Comment

  1. kind of baffled about hausner moving from the haneke/seidl style of lourdes and hotel to this more twee type of film

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