Volume 133: The Early Films of Jessica Hausner
The Voice of Energy Vol. 133
An actual Good Friday to you, my dear subscribers. How is the day treating you? I am still slowly getting over this awful cold that came on quick and knocked me down fast earlier this week. I've spent much of the past four days pinned to the couch rewatching Curb Your Enthusiasm, the start of the 2024 baseball season, and the films that I wrote about for this week's newsletter.
Didn't get any response about my question last week about potentially adding a paid tier to this newsletter. For further context, I envision it being a place for me to offer deeper dives into older films and interviews with filmmakers and other special bits of writing. Does that sound at all interesting to you? Let me know.
Until then, enjoy this look at some of the first features made by one of my favorite directors working today.
The Early Films of Jessica Hausner
Lovely Rita (2001) | Hotel (2004) | Lourdes (2009)
Resolutions don't come easily, if they come at all, in the work of Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner. And it's exactly that irresoluteness that has left many critics baffled and, at times, infuriated by her films. Her most recent feature Club Zero has been dismissed as "strenuous" and "pointless," and her previous film Little Joe was equally denigrated, with The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw sniffing that "its numb weirdness is down to a director with no instinctive feeling for the English language." It's the kind of response Hausner quickly learned to take in stride. As she told one interviewer, "I leave that room for interpretation on purpose. But some people don’t like that — they think, 'Oh, something is missing. Why doesn’t the film tell me what to think?'"
Film Movement isn't fearing such reactions. In fact, the film distribution company could be said to be rubbing the noses of such naysayers into thick of Hausner's artistic voice by following their release of Club Zero with new restorations of the director's first two features, 2001's Lovely Rita and 2004's Hotel, and, with her brilliant 2009 work Lourdes, a wider digital release through streaming and VOD services.
Hausner established her aesthetic and the key themes of her career early with her feature debut Lovely Rita. As with all of her films, the main character is a seemingly meek, icy young woman who isn't given much in the way of dialogue. Getting a bead on their emotional mindsets is only possible by paying close attention to their body language and the furtive movements of their eyes.
That's a lot to ask of any actor, let alone a young woman who had, so far as I can tell, never acted before or since Lovely Rita, but Barbara Osika handled these demands with ease. It could simply be that she was the actual age of the titular character. She walks through every scene with slumped shoulders and a dour expression, bowing under the weight of her strict parents and being a social outcast at her school. The character is clearly intelligent but impulsive, thinking little of the consequences of skipping school and fooling around with a much younger neighbor boy. She only starts to get a sense of how her actions affect others and herself when she gets a crush on a bus driver and awkwardly sets about seducing him.
I've seen some folks refer to Lovely Rita as a coming-of-age film but that feels like a hugely reductive take on what Hausner was working toward. Rita doesn't experience any kind of growth as a person and the lessons she does learn over the course of the film are more devastating than heartwarming. Her decisions become more and more manic and confused, leading to a conclusion that genuinely shocked this jaded film fan.
Rita, like all of Hausner's work up to Club Zero, succeeds through the flat affect of her directorial style and that of her actors. It sets you off your pins and upends genre expectations that have been hardwired by centuries of cinematic history. That only becomes more acute as you go through Hausner's still-slender filmography. Hotel could be pitched as psychological horror with the creeping dread built into its atmosphere and its smart use of deep shadows and unsettling sound design. But it only suggests what may be the source of the film's terrors.
When Irene (Franziska Weisz) comes on board at an isolated Austrian hotel, she's taking over for another young woman who simply vanished. The police hover around the edges of the story, searching for the missing woman's body, but the person or entity responsible for it is only vaguely hinted at. Hausner is more concerned about the distinct dangers that young women face by simply existing in our awful world. Irene gets permission to go swimming in the hotel pool after hours. After a few laps, she hears someone splash into the water on the other side. What or who it was is never revealed. Later, when she brings a suitor back to her room, Hausner keeps the camera on his face as his lustful, expectant grin quickly becomes menacing. It's uniquely chilling and only made more so as Irene seems to almost accept her inevitable fate in this grim tale.
Christine (Sylvie Testud), the lead character in Hausner's most widely-seen feature Lourdes, also seems resigned to her circumstances, living as she has been with MS. Unable to use her limbs, she relies on others for her feeding and care. Her decision, then, to go to the titular Lourdes, the town in the French Pyrenees whose spring waters are said to have healing properties, isn't so much in hopes of being cured of her ailments, but just to get away from her day-to-day doldrums. Much to her surprise, after days of bathing and ceremony, she finds she is able to lift herself out of bed one morning and walk without assistance.
This is all greeted with the expected amount of wonder and suspicion by the other people in her travel group, not to mention simple dismissal by a doctor. This type of MS, he insists, is prone to such remissions. Hausner doesn't dare to admit to any feelings about this being a proper miracle or not and concludes on a perfectly ambiguous note. She also exhibits zero judgment on anyone who go to Lourdes seeking divine relief. One of the more painful moments in the film are when a young woman briefly emerges from the clouds of her developmental disability only to sink quickly back again.
Looked at in total, the lukewarm-to-furious reactions to Hausner's directorial career takes on greater clarity. As a filmmaker, she works in genre but just so, picking around the edges rather than diving right in. And she's unwilling to let viewers off the hook or let them float out of the theater feeling better than when they sat down. If that means the world is going to take some time to catch up with her brilliance, Hausner seems entirely at peace with that. As she told Tim Grierson earlier this year, "[My work] provokes some people to say, 'We don’t like it' — maybe this will never change. As long as the other half says, 'I love it,' I’m okay."
FTA Pick of the Week
Our regular feature — a recommendation of a movie to watch that is hiding below the fold on one of the major streaming services. In other words: fuck the algorithm.
The Wages of Fear (1953, dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot)
In news that took me by surprise this morning, apparently someone went ahead and did a modern-day remake of The Wages of Fear, the brilliant thriller made by French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot, that popped up on Netflix today. I would question the sanity of that decision if William Friedkin hadn't already proved that an equally great redux can be done with his 1977 masterpiece Sorcerer. Whether this 2024 edition delivers or not remains to be seen, but it is as good an excuse as any to spend some with the OG film. The story follows a group of four desperate men who take a job delivering highly combustible explosives to the site of a oil well fire. It requires them to haul this dangerous material in trucks over a truly treacherous mountain road. It's a sweaty, white knuckle ride with all manner of harrowing sequences, including a drive over "the washboard," a rotting platform built over a deep crevasse. If that description has left a thin sheen of sweat on your back, you may not be the audience for this one.
The Wages of Fear is streaming on Kanopy, the Criterion Channel and Max.
That's what I've got for you this week, friends. I hope you'll be back with me next week for another installment. And don't be afraid to share this with friends, family and other film-loving folk in your life. The more, the merrier. Until then: Ceasefire now. Free Palestine.
Artwork for this installment of the newsletter comes from the group exhibition Mysterious Ways: Art, faith, and transcendence that is on display at The Glucksman in Cork, Ireland through July 7.
This newsletter was written on the unceded land where once stood the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area.