Cults and eating disorders warp the mind much in the same way: they convince the individual that their behavior is special and vital, that everyone else can’t see themselves or the world clearly, and that any external opposition only proves the effectiveness and power of their behavior. In her grueling new film “Club Zero,” Austria’s most fearless button-pusher Jessica Hausner fuses the two into a trajectory of slow-moving, inexorable body horror as primly buttoned-up as the lemon-lime polo shirt uniforms selected by her costume-designer sister Tanja.
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Seduced by the unassuming “nutrition teacher” Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska, who withdrew from ballet as a girl in response to her instructors’ pressures to maintain a greyhound physique), a handful of students at a tony boarding school gradually winnow themselves down to nothing, zombified before our widened eyes. She’s welcomed them into a program of “Conscious Eating” that begins with meditation and deep breaths before each tiny forkful of unseasoned veggies, then progresses to a form of absolute fasting her crisply lettered infographics claim will bring them strength, enlightenment, discipline, and everything else their susceptible adolescent minds want for. They each share their personal reason for enlisting in the “class” — weight loss, yes, but also improved focus and loftier environmental imperatives — in an early 360-degree pan counterclockwise, the first creepily dispassionate movement from a camera that observes its subjects with a predatory leer many of my esteemed colleagues have already read as an ironized detachment. Before long, they’re doing it because it’s what they do, having lost all perspective on concepts of health and normalcy in their confused perversion of faith.
Parents of teens will recognize these conversations from their recurring anxiety dreams (and one hopes that’s all). Still, Hausner excels by integrating excruciating fine strokes along the path to a full departure from reality. One girl finds that anorexia frees her from her preexisting bulimia, a lateral move she mistakes for liberation. Miss Novak makes for an unusual svengali in that she seems to fully believe in her quasi-religious regimen of self-destruction, though she first appears with arms and cheeks that suggest otherwise, one of a few logical hiccups that situate the atmosphere in a stiff, affected artifice. The film reserves its real contempt not for her or teachers in general but for the enablers whose willful blind eyes allow or encourage the worst tendencies in the pupils: the headmistress (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is more concerned with protecting the reputation of the school than the people attending it, and most especially the parents modeling every flavor of negligence.
Starting from the wide shot contrasting a couple musing about overconsumption with a sprinkler drenching the lawns of their obscene modernist mansion, Hausner zeroes in on the deficiencies of parents happy to pay through the nose just to keep their offspring out of sight. There’s a spineless dad who’d rather let the situation deteriorate than say any harsh words to his darling girl, a mom who takes her daughter’s refusal to eat as validation for her own sick self-deprivation, a pair of absentees too preoccupied with their foundation in far-off Ghana to notice their child dying. The closest thing to a moral compass comes in the form of a single, middle-class mother barely able to afford tuition, a clear gesture toward capitalist critique teased later on when one ailing girl frames her refusal to eat as a rebuke of consumerism.
While the ideas at play announce themselves without much ambiguity, they’re couched in a tone that can obscure their author’s attitude toward them. Just as she feinted toward a screed against mood-altering medication with 2019’s “Little Joe” only to reveal it as a perspective on the difficulty of letting ourselves have the things we need, so too does “Club Zero” play its cards of intent close to the vest. When one conscious eater announces to her parents that she’s so advanced in her control, she could make it rain or give her mom cancer if she wanted to, a smash cut zips ahead to a downpour the following afternoon. The juxtaposition drew laughter at the Cannes press screening, but the disquieting crux of the scene comes one second later when the mother expresses her worry that she’s now going to develop a tumor. (“That would be quite an unfortunate coincidence,” deadpans her husband, and that’s the thing meant to get a chuckle.) The character’s unfailing self-interest is the point, speaking to the crucial distinction between what Hausner says and the less overt ways by which she tells them.
Taken as a bone-dry satirical comedy, this would be a cruelly glib treatment of material sensitive enough to merit a trigger warning in bright yellow prior to the opening credits. But this agonizing tour through private agony deserves to be taken more seriously than that; the bloodcurdling revelation of a hidden Tupperware full of vomit touches too precise a nerve to be dismissed as rib-elbowing just because a dog starts lapping it up moments later. The nattering, pulsating score that evokes tribal musical traditions gives away the real game here, Hausner’s focus most squarely placed on the stomach-turning efficacy with which insular thought protects and perpetuates itself. It’s an eerily appropriate conceptual foundation for a film bound to drive away those not on Hausner’s frequency, pitched at such a piercing high that it could make blood trickle out the ears of all those able to hear it. [B+]
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