The parents’ council decided that the children should pay more attention to their diet. As if the pressure in the privately funded British education system wasn’t already great enough. Didn’t Emerald Fennell just use her own Oxford experiences in the evil social satire “Saltburn”? The Austrian director Jessica Hausner actually filmed “Club Zero” at the venerable elite university, albeit on the grounds of Wolfson College, which was built in the 1960s.
It is a bright, translucent place that, in its Scandi modernity, appears as tidy as Martin Gschlacht’s pictures. The geometric architecture removes the burden of history from the site: a thousand years of class-conscious meritocracy.
Mindfulness between Mandarin and ballet lessons
Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska) glides between the buildings as if on rails. The world around her also moves in slow motion, which creates a beautiful Insta effect that fits perfectly with the retro chic of the new teacher. Miss Novak comes to the expensive private school with advance praise; her celebrated teaching methods are a welcome change in the dense educational offerings for the future-stricken children from rich families: a bit of mindfulness between Mandarin and ballet lessons.
The fact that her nutrition course also promises extra points for social commitment – increasing the chances of getting the next scholarship – is just a nice side effect.
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Elsa, Fred, Ragna, Ben and Helen take Miss Novak’s class for very different reasons – and all of them have to do with alienation from their parents’ generation. Sustainability, environmental protection, stress reduction, fitness, conscious nutrition: it’s a parade of buzzwords that makes the wealth-neglected trust fund kids look a bit pathetic.
Refusal as a protest against the capitalist ideology of growth. Less is more. But at first glance, “Club Zero” is only about the right life in the wrong one, because the teachings of the educator, who markets her own fasting tea, amount to a provocative punch line.
The “plant-based mono diet” merely acts as a harmless introduction to the world of mindful eating, which is initially practiced with a bar of chocolate. The goal of the course is to completely abstain from eating in order to achieve a higher level of consciousness.
Parents have to endure the consequences of this black pedagogy when their children visit on weekends: passive-aggressive silence at the table, bored picking at the food, puking in the bathroom. The guardians begin to suspect that it might not have been a good idea to hand their children over to the care of the new teacher. However, they are too busy with themselves. You can feel sorry for the kids.
Unhealthy body images even without social media
Nevertheless, at some point you begin to ask yourself what Hausner is actually trying to achieve with her parable. The good reasons for a “mindful diet” will soon no longer be the issue. But social media – still the main cause of unhealthy body images and disordered eating behavior – doesn’t play a role in “Club Zero”. The film seems to exist in its own reality.
The settings are static and sterile, although warm tones predominate. The camera doesn’t even try to disguise the production; the theatrical ambience is underlined by the toneless language. In the school cafeteria, the portions are getting smaller and smaller; Elsa, Fred, Ragna, Ben and Helen now proudly wear their outsider status in the social pecking order like an award. Ben (Samuel D. Anderson), whose single mother can barely afford school fees, is once again economically marginalized within the group.
The teacher’s motives, in contrast to those of the young people, also remain unclear. Miss Novak takes the genderfluid Fred (Luke Barker) under her wing and invites him to the opera. The boundaries between pedagogy and care slowly become blurred, the teacher becomes a mentor: the young people fall for the “zero tolerance” ideology of the self-proclaimed nutrition expert. But Mia Wasikowska’s stoic facial expressions never reveal whether “Club Zero” wants to be a social satire or a modern horror film.
Hausner’s film doesn’t need the trigger warning that precedes “Club Zero”; The director avoids the shock effect of sunken teenage bodies and protruding hip bones. “Club Zero” focuses far too much on the social structure of the upper educated middle class.
The horror is the helpless parents, encapsulated in their luxury houses with glass all around, against whose world the children see no other way out than total renunciation. These interiors fit Hausner’s staging of an experimental setup with a carefully coordinated color concept. However, the fact that Elsa, Fred, Ragna, Ben and Helen might have good reasons for their discomfort escapes the ambivalent morality of “Club Zero”.