[Film Review] Flux Gourmet (2022) and Club Zero (2023)

Title: Flux Gourmet

Year: 2022

Country: UK, Hungary, USA

Language: English, Greek, German

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Director/Screenwriter: Peter Strickland

Cinematography: Tim Sidell

Editor: Mátyás Fekete

Cast:

Fatma Mohamed

Gwendoline Christie

Asa Butterfield

Ariane Labed

Makis Papadimitriou

Richard Bremmer

Leo Bill

Rating: 5.6/10

Title: Club Zero

Year: 2023

Country: Austria, UK, Germany, France, Denmark, Turkey, USA, Qatar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Language: English, French, Chinese

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Thriller

Director: Jessica Hausner

Screenwriters: Jessica Hausner, Géraldine Bajard

Music: Markus Binder

Cinematography: Martin Gschlacht

Editor: Karina Ressler

Cast:

Mia Wasikowska

Florence Baker

Ksenia Devriendt

Luke Barker

Samuel D Anderson

Sidse Babett Knudsen

Amir El-Masry

Gwen Currant

Andrei Hozoc

Sade McNichols-Thomas

Amanda Lawrence

Elsa Zylberstein

Mathieu Demy

Sam Hoare

Camilla Rutherford

Lukas Turtur

Keeley Forsyth

Rating: 7.7/10

A brace of films pertaining to alimentary expressions and choices, yet, “bon appetite” is an inapt wish for us bums on seats because neither is tailored to gratifying foodies. Instead, both films pose a challenge to confront our conventional ideas towards our victuals.

Peter Strickland’s 5th fictional feature FLUX GOURMET is an artsy elaboration on power, dominance and manipulation via a far-out sonic culinary exhibition which is almost unheard of. Meantime, Jessica Hausner’s 6th feature-length film CLUB ZERO introduces a granola method of diet, that is perversely extended to a suicidal starvation to test today’s well-bred young generation’s limit on faith.

As much as an affinity to Strickland’s innovative aesthetic has been grown in Yours Truly - that quaintly lepidopteran, sapphic transgression and fastidious fetishism in THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (2014) is so rare a testimony to unbridled auteurism in the 21st century cinema - it is with a dispirited heart for me to report that FLUX GOURMET is quite hard to embrace, even for Strickland’s fans.

The story goes like this, Elle di Elle (Mohamed), her two assistants Lamina Propria (Labed), also her lover, and Billy Rubin (Butterfield), a step-son figure to her, are performance artists who are granted a coveted one-month residency at an art institution supervised by Jan Stevens (a hoity-toity Christie). A self-effacing journalist Stones (Papadimitriou) is hired to record the trio’s creation process and their soi-disant “sonic catering” performances. As per usual, Strickland’s preoccupation with the sound effects is allotted a goodly canvas to be baked into the trio’s performative reveries. Yet, everything feels more like a noise-fest and cringy showboating.

Divided into three chapters following a physiological course from the mouth, the stomach to the bowel, FLUX GOURMET tosses together the internal strife among the trio, the power one-upmanship throw-down between Elle and Jan Stevens (bickering over “flanger” sounds like a conspiratorial nod to “Friends”, where Phoebe invents something called “left phalange” in the series’ finale to hilariously stop a plane to take off), the shallow sexual favors, to effect a labored relational dynamism which ends up too tedious and unremarkable for audience to take pleasure in. While its arcane usage of sonic technicalities, the absurd performances (when it goes scatological, it hits the rock bottom), plus a sweepingly and insistently detached emotional wavelength, all add insult to injury. It invokes no mystery in its wayward grandstanding of a so-called “artistic collective”. Only a meek and wistful Stones - ailed by his malfunctioning alimentary canal, chagrined by his flatulent epiphenomenon and belittled by a saturnine on-site doctor (Bremmer), engaging in a self-examining introspection with his choice diction and taciturnly fights back against the dread of mortality, only to be blindsided by the gluten-intolerant discovery - generates some breezy levity which is characteristically in paucity in Strickland’s films.

CLUB ZERO spirits audience away to an English-speaking European elite school where Hausner’s antiseptic mise en scène, pastel palette, geometrically pleasing composition, conspire to beguiling hygge atmospherics where generational discord and miscommunication between children and their parents is perniciously brewing.

Miss Novak (Wasikowska, exuding her irrational zeal with perfectly self-contained charm and suasion) is a new teacher in town and introduces a “conscious eating” course appealing to the impressionable students, even the principal Miss Dorset (Knudsen) gladly subscribes to the diet Miss Novak firmly espouses, in the beginning, that is to say. Driven by a pious devotion, eventually Miss Novak feels fit to broach a radical proposition to the most committed students. However, there is an oceanic divide between eating moderately and stopping eating at all, aka, the titular “club zero”, which would eventually be inculcated into the minds of some of the students by a relentless Miss Novak, who is already a member of the club.

Among the devotees, Fred (Barker), blessed with a terpsichorean flair, is discontent being left behind by his parents who are currently devoting their work in Africa; Ragna (Baker) is the most zealous adherent, who probably practices bulimia even before Miss Novak’s course; a weight-concerned Elsa (Devriendt) undergoes a long way to overcome the temptation of food, and once she has done it, nothing can hold her back; and the most pitiful one is Ben (Anderson), a smart, healthy boy who doesn’t even believe “conscious eating” in the first place. Yet, succumbs to inferiority complex (raised by a single mother, he is not from a rich family like others), peer pressure and a strong resolve to nab a future scholarship which can be helped by the course’s credits, Ben is a late-but-not-lesser believer, and his slip is the most instructive case of how to brainwash a non-believer by any radical ideas.

Hausner and her co-scribe Bajard coax out a cogent psychological cause and effect (Miss Novak’s persuasion, the strained family relations) relative to the students’s reactions, actions and interactions, plus how confirmation bias can aid and abet the misinterpretation of one’s “faith”, whereas their parents remain helplessly none the wiser. Only if any of them would’ve arranged a tête-à-tête with their sensitive and competitive child who willfully refuses to eat, one life could’ve been saved.

While CLUB ZERO continues Hausner’s penchant for confronting and scrutinizing faith on its most inexplicable and fanatical terms (LOURDES, 2009; AMOUR FOU, 2014), apart from her rapier-like mindset, her own distinctive style, both visually (her variegated minimalist design and set can be easily recognized and appreciated à la Wes Anderson-lite) and aurally (Markus Binder’s strangle percussive score swells like an otherworldly incantation that casts a hypnotic spell on the audience), also come into sharp being. Hausner has obviously paid her dues. And to answer all the supporters wondering where will be her crowning glory? The film’s final line “But you need to have faith!” sound like a perfect response.

referential entries: Strickland’s BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO (2012, 5.9/10), THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (2014, 8.0/10), IN FABRIC (2018, 6.8/10); Hausner's LITTLE JOE (2019, 6.6/10), LOURDES (2009, 8.0/10).