‘Club Zero’ Review: Jessica Hausner’s Eating Disorder Satire Is a Tough Nut to Crack
27.05.2023 - 02:59
/ thewrap.com
just due to a pukey provocation jury president Ruben Östlund may take as a game, set, match.In simplest terms, “Club Zero” is a film about eating disorders, and one so unflinching about the subject that it warrants a content warning ahead of the opening credits. Of course, Hausner makes abundantly clear that her film is about so much more from the moment those credits roll, and we find ourselves in an affluent private academy full of wood panels, Formica surfaces and about a hundred other interior design choices pulled from a rec room in 1970s hell.Onto the scene struts Ms.
Novak (Mia Wasikowska, with a pageboy ‘do and an implacable accent pitched between Dutch pervert and Austrian gnome) and into the classroom she goes. A wellness coach of apparently some renown (she does have her own brand of Fasting Tea with her face plastered on each box), Ms.
Novak has been hired as Bell Bottom High’s new health instructor. Only once her new pupils speak up, they reveal acutely modern anxieties.One is concerned about ecological collapse, another about economic imbalance, the next about personal optimization.
But whatever the stress, the balm is the same – each must reset their body’s relation to food under a program called Conscious Eating. Like any good scheme, the program comes in steps.
First, they must eat slower – a lot slower, chewing in slow-mo and using cutlery with the theatrical flourish of a classical dancer. Then they must eat less – a lot less, and only one (unprocessed, ideally organic) food item at a time, and then, for those who are really committed, they are to eat nothing at all.As she follows the various string bean students, Hausner uses irony as a cudgel, creating dissonances between the kitschy, taffy-colored
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