Usually, when a film gets booed at Cannes it becomes a badge of honor, the film must be good. Think of the boo-birds that showed up for films by David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, Terrence Malick and Michelangelo Antonioni, among others, over the years.
There were a few boos at my screening of Jessica Hausner’s “Club Zero,” but, this time, I wasn’t in disagreement with the birds. A trailer has been released for Hausner’s film, which will have its cultish followers, and it perfectly captures the tone of the film.
Mia Wasikowska plays Ms. Novak, a well-being professor at an English boarding school. She tries to shake up the status quo by incorporating a no-food diet to a set of six students in her class.
She claims that your body doesn’t need that much nutrition to survive, in fact, you can just take a few bites a day. The benefits, according to her, far outweigh the cons. You’ll feel stronger, more focused and, as a bonus, will be fighting climate change.
As you can imagine, the results end up being disastrous. The students start to get yellow patches on their skins, their grades begin to falter, they start having thoughts about a brave new world devoid of the system that chains them.
Much like her last film, 2019’s “Little Joe,” the idea behind “Club Zero” is an interesting one, but the execution is incredibly dry. Hausner is a visually talented filmmaker, but her screenplays are subpar. She can’t seem to inject some much-needed focus into them.
What Hausner means to create here is a provocation. A treatise on the infiltrated groupthink of today’s youth culture. That’s fair enough. But, much like in “Little Joe,” she doesn’t develop her ideas properly and stops short of truly provoking.
On a brighter note, Hausner’s use of matching color and costume is again visually arresting in this film, but it only enhances the superficial nature of the whole thing.