Miss Novak has everything she needs to teach. Archetype of the old clean and invested girl, she is ready to sacrifice her weekends not to cut the link with the private establishment in which she has just been affected. Adorned with a small pastel polo, long skirt and XXL suit jacket, Miss Novak specializes in conscious feeding, a lubie derived from naturotherapy that she intends to teach to a circle of insiders in this school not like the others.
You will not eat
After Heavy presented at the Venice Mostra in 2009, Crazy love and Little Joe, noticed in Cannes in 2014 and 2019 respectively, it is the turn of Club Zero to come and illustrate on the cruise. Jessica Hausner Sign here his sixth feature film with an acidic satire on our consumer society. A film that puts our beliefs to the test of a teacher's grip, dedicated body and soul to nutrition conscious for her young recruits sometimes so gullible.
In this class of a new genre where alternative pedagogy occupies a cardinal place, each student has registered with his full sandstone: some out of conviction that we should moderate our unbridled consumption in a world with exhaustable resources, others by complex, inevitable corolar of adolescence. There is also this « eco-anxiety » Greta sauce that wants to save the environment at all costs as required by the new fashionable expression to decredify the detractors of a blind capitalism to ecocide in motion. And there's the first in the class, Ben, who more trivially just wants to keep his purse. A more reserved temperament, moreover, is the only one who slices in this school to the public from the « first of ropes ».
Club Zero is an original proposal where, from the start, everyone seems to walk on the head. Miss Novak's classes, where people gather in circles, like anonymous alcoholics, are more like a cult than a traditional class. It is in the first place that it is a matter of confessing to the motivations that prompted the students to join this picturesque program. Little by little, Miss Novak entangles young people towards an ever more restrictive diet to respiranism, this illustrious current that claims that we can feed on air and light (as everyone knows).
Jessica Hausner's film grows absurd with a deliberately distancing tone. Modern architecture is ice cold and by contrast, all these teens seem « shake like fireflies » in front of dark walls as the amused director confides. First, there is a pastel chromatic palette that jumps to the eye and will evolve more and more towards the monochrome, like the monodiete diet to which the club aspires. This set of colors recalls his film Little Joe in which the contrast with the « vermilion red » was obvious.
Money is chic!
While each of its members is driven as much by competition as the desire to integrate into the group, the students go ever further until they worry their parents. Jessica Hausner amuses and does not hesitate to sing this praise of the slowness promoted by conscious diet up to this scene of « Meals » stratospheric, where young people do not even bother to swallow their pition. Each one observes as if nothing was happening, simulating a surface satiety.
Beyond an eye-catching palette of colours, the director demonstrates intelligence in her staging. The camera is never as cold as it was at family meals. The table presents a quasi-religious grammar where the maids come to bring trays that drip with money and indecency. Static camera in height, each gesture is measured. Whether it's the bobo family or the nobler family, it's the same feeling that goes through meals: that of relatives completely disconnected from the real, like this father who starts a lesson in morals about wastage while the automatic watering overflows to vomit on the terrace.
Together and separated
A paradox while the very nature of a meal should always respond to conviviality. So there's nothing unusual that teenagers seek refuge from one prison to another. Even these rich villas are separated from the outside world by gigantic doors that ironically recall a cell. It is also on this subject that Club Zero is the most crazy. While in a decade or so, it is estimated that half of the planet will be obese or overweight, causing an avalanche of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancers, Jessica Hausner likes to deploy a particularly acerbic diagnosis on our schizophrenic society.
A world where we are sold all day long with filiform mannequins but where no advertising sign discourages us from baffling. To consume more to fill the void of a superficial existence dictated by money. By playing on the register of vanity and absurdity, Jessica Hausner delivers an intelligent film, carried by a remarkable OST made by composer Markus Binder. He spoke of his approach at the press conference dedicated to the film:
« I wanted the music of the film to be secular. I really insist on that. I find religion interesting from a cultural point of view, but otherwise I don't trust it. One might say that techno or electro music embodies the secularization of sacred music.»
If the director is usually more customary « Diegetic music, i.e. music that the characters hear », she wanted « show that events inevitably follow one another ». Composed exclusively for the film, the OST flies by reminding us of the real. Resolutely radical in its approach, Club Zero is never free for that. If the outcome may seem a little abscond, it is ultimately secondary. Among the defects, some very slight inconsistencies may be blamed at times, but one will gladly forgive.
The message of this modern farce is enough to keep the spectator in breath. Indoctrination feeds on the fears of our times. And it is starting with them that we should attack with full force. Everyone is finally complicit by pure hypocrisy. A film that won't please everyone... and that's so much better!
« Arrested » in an image to the malady precision, this corrosive satire on our food consumption and the dangers of indoctrination is under the cut of a #MiaWasikowska magnetic food guru. With this idol of fasting, hard to stay on his hunger!
[...] KillerS7ven's criticism [...]