‘Club Zero’: a cold and insipid tale about anorexia

With surreal black comedy that never quite gels, Austrian Jessica Hausner proposes a Pied Piper-like morality tale about eating disorders among adolescents in Club Zero. Its plot takes place in a private school where a group of schoolchildren in yellow uniforms who hail from well-heeled families sign up for a new activity: a course on “conscious eating” taught by a guru from the currently ubiquitous culture of wellness, whose recipes for “eating well” set them down the path of no return.

It’s interesting how Hausner locates the underlying errors that lead to the obsessive rejection of food among the story’s adolescents within both parental behavior and the educational system. But Club Zero — despite its valuable exposition of such a dire, complex issue as anorexia — stalls halfway through. The idea of a privileged club with cult-like overtones that brainwashes the young with confusing, deceitful slogans, doesn’t work. The film doesn’t function as a black comedy, nor as educational dystopia, nor as a supposed metaphor for a society generating such pathologies in the name of pseudo-science that takes the pursuit of personal salvation past the point of nonsense.

In her critique of poorly digested topics like mindfulness, saving the planet, personal care and physical control and discipline, Hausner throws both ridiculous and relevant ideas under the same bus. She presents her characters as illuminated and ailing robots.

Her chilly gaze is anchored in the film’s use of color, as in her previous projects like Little Joe (2019). The aesthetic overlaps with a sense of ironic cynicism that for a moment, is attractive, but winds up becoming tiresome in its repetition, as well as ungenerous with the film’s characters. Without breaking the loop of today’s omnipresent mantras (our obsession with ingredients, nutritional purity, the cult of the body), the film becomes mechanical and orthopedic; an icy nightmare. Hausner focuses the story on the teacher-guru, then ends up disengaging from its central character to render him a caricature, just as it has his faithful students. In the end, Club Zero is bubblegum stretched thin, its message rendered an insipid, confusing mouthful.

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