Little Joe (Jessica Hausner, 2019)

From its Cannes debut right up to its current U.S. commercial release, Jessica Hausner's English-language debut Little Joe has been leaving many critics ice cold. And it seems that part of the problem is that this general lack of affect, the film's unwillingness to adopt a moral or even a straightforward allegorical stance and just deliver on it, is part of the problem. Hausner's direction is nothing if not controlled, relying on slow pans, composition in depth, and the slowest of zooms, all putting the film's indecisive content across with a surgical precision. The fact that much of Little Joe actually takes place in the sterile, hermetically sealed environment of a synthetic botany lab -- a literal hothouse -- only makes the stifling rigor that much more painfully self-reflexive.

No one is denying Hausner's directorial chops. The question (or really, the complaint) I see raised is that it's all in the service of nothing very much. Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham, unexpected winner of Best Actress at Cannes) is a workoholic plant geneticist who has created a plant whose presence and aroma is meant to "make people happy," in just those vague terms. She calls the bright red, spore-emitting menace Little Joe, after her own (human) son Joe (Kit Connor), whose adolescence is bringing attitudinal changes Alice cannot quite wrap her head around. Due in part to the desperate entreaties of an emotionally unstable colleague (Kerry Fox), Alice starts to believe that Little Joe is semi-sentient, its spores altering the brain chemistry of those who inhale them. In short order, Little Joe evolves into a fairly by-the-numbers riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with Alice convinced that her Frankenstein's creation has changed humanity into mindless servants of the new organism she invented.

The problem, as I've seen it articulated, is that Hausner does nothing with this allegory. She simply plays it out, leaving it both unadorned and undecidable. The "body snatchers" problem is presented as a bald fact, worked through to its necessary conclusion, without any particular complications or a new inflection that would make Little Joe seem worthwhile. After Cannes, Owen Gleiberman (who likes the film) saw it as a condemnation of psychoactive medication, which I guess it could be. But I actually think Hausner is aiming for something much more frustrating, and more in keeping with her highly austere formalism.

For one thing, this is a film about hybridization and the consequences of manipulating nature of capitalist purposes. Hausner, rather than making another German language film, has opted to work in English. (She has of course worked primarily in French, on 2009's Lourdes.) British film, inasmuch as it has a national signature, tends to be associated with realism, particularly of the Ken Loach / Mike Leigh "kitchen sink" variety, even though neither of those men work in that idiom any longer. Hausner, by contrast, is a "chilly" Austrian of the Haneke / Seidl school. 

As Little Joe progresses, we see the acting and behavior become steadily less "Method" and more "Austrian," in keeping with the chilly austerity of Little Joe's dominant aesthetic. That is, one part of the hybrid is taking over (the emotionless side). This can best be seen in the shift in Chris, played by Ben Whishaw. His halting awkwardness gives way to grim male forcefulness. Even his aggression feels calculated. Compare this with Bella (Fox), the one character aside from Alice most obviously not under the control of Little Joe. Her demeanor becomes more unhinged and demonstrative -- more emotional. (The casting of Fox, an actor of the Method school who even went so far as to have unsimulated sex with Mark Rylance on camera, for Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy, seems germane here.)

So we could perhaps think of this as a film about "zombification" as gradual consequence of Continental film style overtaking Anglo-American histrionics. But even if one finds Little Joe unconvincing on this score, Hausner's film functions on a purely formalist level in its denial of a satisfactory raison d'être. After all, narrative itself, with its plotting and antagonism and contests of wills -- questions of desire and history -- are uniquely human propositions. What we are witnessing in Little Joe, by contrast, is the end of such things, the end of "allegory" itself, replaced by "plant logic," which has no stories to tell. It simply propagates itself.