2024-03-29 14:42:28
Film „Club Zero“
Food is also just a conspiracy theory
As of: 3:42 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Gentle-satanic: Mia Wasikowska as Mrs. Novak
Those: © coop99
Director Jessica Hausner has taken the cult of nutrition to the extreme: What if we just stop eating at all? In “Club Zero,” boarding school students are seduced by a creepy teacher. Watching that is hard to digest.
The moviegoer doesn’t have an appetite after watching this film. On the contrary: the popcorn tended to pop up again at one point or another. Just like the students in Jessica Hausner’s film “Club Zero” constantly regurgitate their food.
The film, which was invited to the Cannes Festival last year, is set somewhere in an elite boarding school. There, the newly hired nutrition coach Novak – appropriately dressed in a tracksuit – teaches a few students that eating is nothing more than an annoying cultural and ultimately evil capitalist habit. But the good news: you can break the habit again. To do this, you first learn to eat food consciously: breathe in deeply, halve the piece of potato again, or better yet quarter it, slowly bring it to your mouth, smell it and finally chew it carefully.
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Ms. Novak is played by Australian Mia Wasikowska. Tim Burton lovers know her as Alice in the dark, wondrous film adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland.” In “Club Zero,” Wasikowska takes on the role of the anti-heroine who, with fasting teas and a diabolical gentleness, slowly forms a group of young people into her cult. Actually, they just wanted a few extra points for their certificate with the help of nutrition science. But the school subject soon becomes an obsession. Anyone who doesn’t take part is a traitor to the higher goal and must be brought into line.
Body, struggle and capital
The goal? Actually everything: climate protection, control over mind and body, fight against consumption and capital. They are boarding school children with rich but, as the film suggests, complicated parents. While mom and dad talk about giving up on their balconies, the camera zooms out to reveal their opulent houses and gardens.
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The film is told slowly, painfully slowly. The scenes repeat themselves. Someone is sitting at the kitchen table again and doesn’t want to eat anything. The parents are again trying to persuade him or her. Bad words and burning silence. Then there is choking, vomiting, and eating what has been choked again, until the viewer has to ask themselves how far they are actually willing to go for a metaphor – and whether they should leave the cinema early.
Ms. Novak and her circles of chairs are accompanied by eternal drums and bird’s eye views. The parents – or other students – do not seriously try to stop the teacher. An effort to limit damage is the highest of emotions. Such tension would have been good for the story. Only one mother seems genuinely concerned about her son and realizes the extent of the danger. Of course it’s the poor single mother with the scholarship son. The working class still loves their children in a way that the rich are too blind to understand.
In the end, you don’t know exactly who the Austrian director Jessica Hausner, a welcome guest at major film festivals, is actually making fun of. Actually about everyone: lifestyle gurus, neoliberal optimizers and young people eager to improve. It is a work that allows for many interpretations. However, watching is torture. The viewer is served one unappetizing and monotonous morsel after the next.
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