Club Zero
Cinestudio
Trinity College
Hartford
April 3, 2024
(This review contains spoilers.)
Food is an incredibly difficult topic to talk about. People talk about weight loss, diabetes, famine, and topics around food, but very rarely discuss food itself, outside of how to prepare it.
Club Zero, which was showing at Cinestudio at Trinity College, dives head first into the messy world of food in what could have been a thoughtful consideration of our relationship to eating. But it goes off track in the end.
The movie begins when a new teacher, Ms. Novak (played by Mia Wasikowska) is hired by an elite boarding school to teach nutrition.
At first, Ms. Novak is simply teaching the children about “mindful eating,” a way to change their relationship to food which will help them achieve their food related goals, which range from decreasing body fat to combating global warming.
As the film progresses, though, Ms. Novak convinces the children to eat less and less. That’s where the movie’s consequences begin.
The most striking aspects of Club Zero is the way that food and eating are shown to be a brilliant canvas for visual movie making. One of the most memorable scenes of the movie comes when the children are sitting at lunch, “eating.” Early in the movie, Ms. Novak instructs the children that mindful eating requires them to meditate on their food before each bite. They take a forkful of food, breathe in and out several times to consider the food, and then eat it. Ms. Novak tells them that this form of mindful eating will help them to eat less, and break free of the social and capitalistic underpinnings of gluttonous consumption.
Eventually, though, the concept of mindful eating is taken to the extreme. In the scene, the children meditate on the food, but don’t eat it. They simply imagine the taste of the food before placing it back on their plate. They smile and joke with each other, discussing how wonderful the food is that they’re not even tasting.
It’s moments like these (and others far more shocking, but I don’t want to spoil everything) that show the movie that Club Zero could have been — a real conversation about what food is, what eating is. The interplay of culture, morality, consumerism and necessity that food and eating represent is a fascinating concept that I’d never given much thought to until I started watching the movie. I was hoping for more of that as the movie progressed.
Unfortunately, those potentially interesting discussions were sidelined by a retreat into a more standard storyline regarding teachers and students. Ms. Novak is accused of being too intimate with a student and is fired from the school as a result. This process takes about 20 minutes. That’s 20 minutes taken away from seeing the consequences of starving children or from discussing the philosophy of food.
By the time the movie gets back on track — the parents realize that only Ms. Novak can get their children to eat again, so they go to find her — the audience is hit with another distraction that turns out to apparently be the point of the whole film. By refusing to eat, the children have successfully demonstrated their commitment and can join Club Zero. It’s essentially a death cult, and Ms. Novak promises the children that they are ”leaving behind their transitory existence to find eternal life.”
The movie ends with the parents finding their children’s goodbye letters, as they’ve run off to join Ms. Novak. It’s not clear whether they have actually died or simply abandoned their old lives. Only student that remains, as she missed Ms. Novak’s call because she was on vacation with her family.
There is a real-life example of a starvation cult which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Kenyans, including children. But venturing towards reality ultimately guts the movie of anything interesting to talk about other than “cults are bad.” An opportunity to discuss food and eating in this context is lost, and instead buried under taboos of sexual relationships and overzealousness that most people already agree are bad.
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Cinestudio is showing Ex Machina: The IMAX Experience on April 4.
Jamil goes to find a great dinner spot.
