FILM REVIEW –
May 22, 2023 – Anorexia, of course, is a deadly serious condition, and there are numerous dramas that have dealt with it. But the scaldingly subversive premise of “Club Zero” is that in this movie, anorexia has been institutionalized. It is being taught — as a form of dominating self-discipline, higher ethical values and religious zeal. The students, in eating less and less, think that they’re investing in the environment and speaking truth to power. The enjoyment of food gets replaced, for them, by the enjoyment of being high on abstinence. And Ms. Novak is just getting started. Hausner, who co-wrote the movie, taps into something about food that’s also bigger than food. Anorexia, in its dire hidden distress, has sometimes been described as a kind of individualized fascism, in which the person suffering from it becomes both master and prisoner. Mia Wasikowska, who is such a fine actor, plays Ms. Novak with the unruffled coercive benevolence of a New Age guru, and the movie uses the insidiousness of her presence, and the students’ response to it, to suggest a new kind of mentality that’s beginning to ripple through the culture.
It’s about people looking for saviors, for the reassurance of certainty, for extreme methods to counteract their extreme alienation and anxiety. And it’s about fighting an apocalyptic vision of what the future is going to be: the running out of resources, the earth melting down. Is that paranoid mental illness or is it reality? It’s part of the film’s harrowingly funny yet deadly sincere design that in the context of current social-political concerns, eating disorders, with their coded patterns of order, could now almost be looked upon as something to strive for.
