'Club Zero': a cold and insipid tale about anorexia

With a tone of surreal black comedy that never quite gels, Austrian Jessica Hausner proposes in

Club Zero

a moral tale a la

Pied Piper of Hamelin

about eating disorders in adolescents.

The plot is set in a private school in yellow uniforms where a group of schoolchildren from wealthy families sign up for a new activity, a course on “conscious eating” taught by a guru of the omnipresent well-being trend, what they now call

wellness

. whose recipes for “eating well” lead to a path of no return.

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“In society we all wear uniforms”

It is interesting how Hausner detects both in the habits of some parents and in the educational system itself the underlying errors that lead to the obsessive rejection of food in the adolescents of the story.

But

Club Zero

- although it has the merit of addressing an issue as terrible and complex as anorexia - stagnates in the middle and the idea of ​​a privileged club with sect overtones that brainwashes the youngest with confusing and misleading slogans, It doesn't quite work, neither as a black comedy, nor as an educational dystopia, nor as a supposed metaphor for a society that generates this type of pathology in the name of a pseudoscience that takes personal salvation to the point of meaninglessness.

Mia Wasikowska, in 'Club Zero'.

In his criticism of the poor digestion of issues such as

mindfulness,

saving the planet, taking care of the body or physical control and discipline, Hausner puts ridiculous aspects in the same bag along with other relevant ones as if they were the same and all of this , while presenting its characters as enlightened, sick robots.

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The director's cold gaze is anchored in the use of color, as occurred in her previous films such as

Little Joe

(2019).

An aesthetic that overlaps with an ironic cynicism that is attractive for a second, but ends up being boring because it is repetitive, as well as being ungenerous towards its characters.

Without leaving the loop of those very common slogans (obsession with ingredients, nutritional purity added to the cult of the body...), the film becomes mechanical and orthopedic;

a cold nightmare.

Hausner focuses on the teacher-guru, but she ends up ignoring this central character to turn him into the same caricature as her faithful students.

In the end,

Club Zero

turns out to be an overly stretched bubblegum that turns its message into a tasteless and confusing concoction.

Club Zero

Director:

Jessica Hausner.

Starring:

Mia Wasikowska, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Elsa Zylberstein, Mathieu Demy, Amir El-Masry. 

Genre:

tragicomedy.

Austria, 2023. 

Duration:

110 minutes. 

Premiere: March 22.

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