She is in the school at the instigation of the parents association to teach an elective on nutrition.
Yes, she will accept a packet of Miss Novaks fasting tea.
She will skip her customary cake.
‘Club Zero’Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
We could all do better, mindfully speaking.
Miss Novak is an inspiration.
Elsa, Ragna and Ben go home for weekends.
Helenas parents take her skiing.
They find their children starting to pick at food, then refusing to eat at all.
Ragnas father devotedly makes vegan food, trying to curry favor with his daughter, the champion trampoliner.
Vegan, she says contemptuously to him, is so over.
There is a sense here that Hausner is constructing her little circle of obsessional starvers as a pure cult.
Also immediately recognizable is the nutritional information Miss Novak feeds her class.
Lifestyle sections of respectable newspapers are full of it.
Intensive farming does impact climate change.
Ultra-processed food has been linked to allergies and other maladies.
That is what gives persuasive power to any cults shtick: the bits we already agree with.
There are people who claim to live on light alone, reported straight-faced in said newspapers.
Hausner has not had to invent anything.
There is a great deal to admire here in all this.
There is a brilliant percussive score by Markus Binder, erupting as thumps and bangs like aural jump scares.
There are those sharply constructed images and Hausners refusal to look away from uncomfortable facts.
There are even moments of bitter humor.
You have to laugh.
Or perhaps that is desire for resolution, dressed up as criticism.
Perhaps, like those helpless, inadequate parents, I just want to see those kids eat.
