“You’re never sure what is really the right thing to do. But we decided to have this warning or disclaimer in the beginning, in case there is someone watching the film who has maybe experience with eating disorders and doesn’t want to get triggered or anything. So the person can decide for themselves if they stay or go.”
When the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, some critics were so baffled that they felt Hausner might have been meant it ironically.
“I don’t see it ironic,” she replies. “Someone else asked me the same question. I was astonished, because I never thought that it was ironic. But, you know, everyone has a different [take on] things.”
Indeed, for a film that deals with the very real – and very devastating – topic of food-related health, it is hard to believe anyone might feel it is ironic.
Set in an elite British boarding school, the story of Club Zero centres on the new nutrition teacher, Ms Novak (Mia Wasikowska), who runs a course in conscious eating.
Her class includes mindfulness, meditation and cutting down on processed foods.
The internet is full of crazy ideas and you will find anything there
But there is more to the quietly radical Novak than meets the eye: encouraging five of her pupils to join her cultish underground group, Club Zero, she wants to lead a revolution in which her young charges will survive on no food at all, in an effort to help save the planet.
“My interest in this film is basically about the question of manipulation,” Hausner says.
“Miss Novak is telling the kids some things that might seem right in the beginning, so her lessons about conscious eating are good to some extent: eat slowly, eat well, think where the food comes from. So that’s all ideas that are actually quite healthy.
“But from there, she takes it further, and I think that’s what the film is about. Why are those kids following her so far? And why is there a sort of radicalisation happening?”
Club Zero taps into the idea of fad diets that have become increasingly prevalent over the years.
These can take all kinds of forms, from intermittent fasting routines such as the 5:2 diet – which sees practitioners eat normally for five days a week and consume only 500 calories a day on the other two – to more punishing diets such as therapeutic fasting, which was developed in Germany in 1935 by Dr Otto Buchinger and involves only consuming liquids – water, vegetable stock and so on – for a week or more.
While these diets have plenty of supporters, Hausner and her co-writer Géraldine Bajard deliberately explore the extremes of weight loss.
“The internet is full of crazy ideas and you will find anything there,” Hausner says.
Not least “breatharianism”, a movement that claims people can survive on a diet of air and sunlight. Advocates believe that a nourishing energy, known in Hinduism as prana, can be absorbed from the air. Hausner studied videos of the subject, and even alludes to the practice in the movie.
The petite, Vienna-born director is no follower of these radical diets. “I don’t do that. Mindfulness-based stress reduction … no, I don’t do it.”
But was she worried that impressionable viewers might take Novak’s “Club Zero” idea to heart?
“I wasn’t worried about that because I think it’s very clearly shown that the idea of Miss Novak is devastating in the end. So we clearly understand that the kids are getting weaker and skinny and that they are going towards decay.”
Club Zero is not the first movie to tackle the devastating effects of extreme weight loss. To the Bone (2017), starring Lily Collins, was a stark examination of a girl with anorexia. Likewise, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary Thin (2006) followed four girls suffering from both anorexia and bulimia.
Our children are the most valuable thing we have. We should value caregivers and teachers very much. We should pay them really well
But those conditions are not even mentioned in Club Zero, a film that some may find troubling because of Hausner’s tendency to craft a hyper-stylised world full of bright primary colours – think the meticulousness of Wes Anderson.
Rather than create a harrowing portrait of food-related health issues or attempt to take down the multimillion-dollar dieting industry, Hausner is more concerned about how we care for our children, “a problem” she feels is systemic in society.
“It is not well organised who is taking care of our children, and our children are the most valuable thing we have. We should value caregivers and teachers very much. We should pay them really well, and we should appreciate them.
“But in our society, it’s other positions that are well paid and honoured. And I think that’s very weird.”
Moreover, in a world of overconsumption and greed, Hausner wanted Club Zero to examine the way that children are rebelling against their parents’ generation as they show changing attitudes to food and the world’s increasingly scarce resources.
The kids in Club Zero, it seems, get high on their virtuous attempts to stave off an environmental apocalypse.
“They have a good point,” Hausner says. “The climate is changing, and I think we don’t have as much time as other generations had to solve this problem.”
I wouldn’t call it poking fun. I think I embrace my characters very much, and I also love their weaknesses
As Novak’s acolytes reduce their weight as a way of saving the planet, theirs is an institutionalised anorexia, a fundamentalist form of protest against the eco-nightmare they will inherit from their mothers and fathers.
“They want to save the world or to rescue the planet, but how do you do it? I mean, that’s where it starts to get complicated. And they choose a very radical way. And we all agree, OK, that’s wrong, but then what is the alternative? And I think that’s a contradiction and crazy situation.”
Is Hausner poking fun at the earnest nature of Gen Z when it comes to mindfulness and ecology?
“I wouldn’t call it poking fun,” she says, cautiously. “I think I embrace my characters very much, and I also love their weaknesses … everyone is sometimes ridiculous. And I would say that’s normal.
“I think it comes from the fact that we take ourselves very seriously. But from a more distanced perspective … what we think is so important becomes ridiculous.”
You have been (trigger) warned.