With Progressive Bromides Dominating the Cultural Landscape, Films Like ‘Club Zero’ Offer Welcome Perspective

“The problem with this movie is that it is entirely too believable”: That was the opinion of a friend, an academic of long standing who is a bemused observer of social mores, with whom I watched the new film by Austrian director Jessica Hausner, “Club Zero.” Anyone conversant with ideological fashion will recognize the currents that are refracted through Ms. Hausner’s satirical lens. “Club Zero” is a pitiless movie. “Club Zero” joins “American Fiction” in questioning the progressive bromides that have come to dominate the cultural landscape. The parameters of her movie are icier than Cord Jefferson’s take on identity politics and, as such, less ingratiating. The laughter “Club Zero” generates isn’t full-bodied so much as trepidatious. We’re sometimes left to wonder just what it is we’re finding funny — which means, I think, that Ms. Hausner’s picture hits the mark more often than not.This is the director’s second time working with screenwriter Géraldine Bajard, their previous collaboration being “Little Joe” (2019). That film, a similarly affectless take on science-gone-too-far, didn’t get a lot of critical love. “Club Zero” will likely follow suit. The picture has barely seen the light of day and is already being hailed as a cult classic — testimony to Ms. Hausner’s stringent sensibility and rarefied aesthetic, but also a marker of its quixoticism and integrity.In its formal rigor and distinctive production design, “Club Zero” is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971). Ms. Hausner’s movie is nowhere near as sensationalistic, nor does it possess the scope of Kubrick’s dystopian “horror show.” Chalk up this distinction to a difference in budget — “Club Zero” is more modest in that regard — but don’t discount the contemporaneity of each film’s respective time-frame. Kubrick, positing a distant future, could afford to engage in hyperbole. For Ms. Hausner, the future is now: Understatement is a coefficient of parody that cuts close to the bone.Miss Novak (a prim, almost preternaturally certain Mia Wasikowska) is a new hire at an exclusive British boarding school. She has been brought in to teach a course in “Conscious Eating.” Her class is small in size and diverse in make-up, and the students are intensely particular as to why they’ve signed up. Some of their reasons are rational (controlling diabetes; staying trim for athletics), others practical (beefing up one’s CV), and some troubling (locating a philosophical basis for bulimia). One humorless young woman’s goal is to save the planet. Everyone’s on board with that.Luke Barker, Florence Baker, Gwen Currant, Ksenia Devriendt, and Samuel D. Anderson in ‘Club Zero.’ Via Coop99Yet is everyone on board with Miss Novak? As the class progresses, her lessons in mindfulness, self-care, and fill-in-the-fashionable-nostrum take on an ever more rigorous mandate. One clueless boy in the class, Ben (Samuel D. Anderson), likes food. As a result, he’s looked down upon by his fellow students and, in a more insinuating fashion, Miss Novak. Peer pressure, being what it is, converts Ben to a diet that is ever more limited in options — much to the consternation of his mother (a gawky, voluble and decidedly prole Amanda Lawrence). The rest of the parents only become concerned when their children stop eating altogether.As much as it nettles their good liberal bona fides, these mums and dads begin to have second thoughts about Miss Novak’s pedagogy. So does the school’s principal, Miss Dorset (Sidse Babette Knudsen, fitted to the nines and magisterial in her absurdity). After initially hewing to the new teacher’s dietary regimen, Miss Dorset finds that High Tea is less rewarding without a dash of whole milk and a plate of cookies. Miss Nowak needs talking to.In the grand tradition of Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, and in-its-prime National Lampoon, Mses. Hausner and Bajard reveal extremism as being nihilism festooned in do-gooder drag. “Club Zero” is a hard film to like, but it is welcome all the same.

With Progressive Bromides Dominating the Cultural Landscape, Films Like ‘Club Zero’ Offer Welcome Perspective

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