Jessica Hausner (2019)
The title character is both a laboratory-created plant and the boy that it’s named for. The protagonist is Alice (Emily Beecham), best described as a breeder. She’s the mother of young teenager Joe (Kit Connor) and she leads the scientific team that develops his namesake. Jessica Hausner (Lourdes, Amour Fou), who wrote the screenplay for Little Joe with Géraldine Bajard, dramatises the disturbance wrought in Alice’s life through the interaction of her two main roles. Her supposedly beneficent lab creation has various maleficent effects. Her son, accidentally pollinated by one of the plants, which his mother smuggles out of her workplace and brings home, begins to show an unfamiliar hostility towards Alice.
Little Joe requires more care than the average house plant. Its USP is a scent that makes its owner ‘happy’. As evidence emerges that all exposed to its pollen are behaving strangely, and Alice is fearfully convinced that the plant has mutated into a pathogenic virus, the lab head Karl (David Wilmot) insists that it does make people happy ‘but not in the way we intended’. It’s hard to know what he means because Hausner hasn’t made clear what was intended or what ‘happy’, in this context, means. Is the plant’s scent the equivalent of a happy pill, an anti-depressant? Or does it induce a deeper feeling of wellbeing? In his Observer review, Mark Kermode writes that ‘Little Joe’s mood-lifting smell triggers the production of oxytocin – “the mother hormone” that will make you “love this plant like your own child”’. This is relevant to the central character – the film might equally have been called ‘Alice’s Choice’ – but how exactly does it apply to her son? Whatever Little Joe’s feel-good properties may be they’re all the more remarkable in view of the plant’s unprepossessing appearance. The hot-looking, ugly red blooms do anything but raise the viewer’s spirits.
Emily Beecham’s Alice, much prettier than her creation, is also a redhead: her hair is the only colourful thing about her. Alice has a pale complexion that goes with her etiolated wardrobe. You barely notice the difference when she removes her lab coat (the usual white modified to a sickly shade of eau de nil). Her blouses, trousers and tracksuits are off-white, the palest pink or beige – drained of warmth. Her usual level of reaction makes Alice seem remote, even robotic. Apparently a caricature of scientific dispassion, she nevertheless has regular sessions with a psychotherapist (Lindsay Duncan). These interviews serve mainly to emphasise the patient’s unnatural pallor. The therapist, ensconced in an armchair covered in richly-patterned material, dresses in bold floral prints. She poses several questions to Alice in the course of the film but you really want her to ask, ‘Why do you wear such weird clothes?’
You don’t expect a screen sci-fi lab creation to turn out well or a present-day arthouse film to be a cheerleader for consumer-oriented genetic engineering. Little Joe runs true to form in both respects but Jessica Hausner grafts onto them a gender politics parable. As well as Alice and her eerily composed therapist, there are two other noteworthy female characters. The sole purpose of Joe’s sort-of girlfriend Selma (Jessie Mae Alonzo) is to add to Alice’s disconcertment. The girl has an oriental look and the inscrutability that’s gone with that since the days of silent movies. (The sometimes matching music by the Japanese Teijo Ito also includes big percussive sounds and a cacophony of animal noises.) While Selma is forgotten about in the closing stages, Alice’s colleague-cum-rival Bella (Kerry Fox) is a persistently more significant figure. She used to be the lab’s star plant-breeder but her career has been interrupted by mental illness. Bella has recently returned to work but her abortive attempts to cultivate a plant that can survive weeks of neglect are upstaged by Alice’s development of Little Joe.
Believe it or not, Bella is routinely accompanied to the lab by her dog (named Bello). He goes missing one day and, when he turns up, his nature has changed for the worse. After having him euthanised, Bella tells Alice the dog must have been affected by whatever Little Joe is emitting. Bella’s behaviour from this point onwards is erratic, though consistent in supplying a twist to the plot. Exposed to the plant’s pollen herself, she announces that her earlier suspicion of Little Joe was no more than an expression of her paranoid tendencies: she says she’s fine now. Not long afterwards, she denies having inhaled pollen and announces to her colleagues, in the staff canteen, that she only pretended to be fine – in order to blend in with them. Bella rushes from the canteen in great distress. The ensuing confrontation with Karl and Alice’s assistant Chris (Ben Whishaw) ends with Bella’s attempting suicide. This, at least, is what is reported as happening – it isn’t shown on screen.
Bella doesn’t reappear but Hausner compares and contrasts her fate with the heroine’s. Alice resolves to destroy the Little Joes by reducing the lab temperature. Chris forcibly prevents her, knocking Alice to the ground and exposing her to the plant’s pollen. By the time Little Joe is nominated for a prestigious award that offers the prospect of international commercial success, Alice has abandoned her plans to rid the world of it – plans she now ascribes to her own paranoia. Early in the film, Alice and Chris went out for a drink; he tried to kiss her but she resisted. When Chris apologises for hitting her, Alice kisses him. Joe’s rebellion against his mother includes wanting to go and live with his estranged father. Alice is, for her, upset by this but, once she’s breathed in Little Joe, concedes the issue. She drives her son out to the rural home of his father Ivan (Sebastian Hülk), to start a new life there. Alice will be content with the botanical rather than the human Joe. Whereas Bella eventually refuses to fit in, Alice accedes to the wishes of the men and the boy in her life who are determined to get their own way. Her initial sterilisation of the plants causes them to pollinate more aggressively. Exposure to Little Joe’s pollen seems to mean inhaling the infection of male hegemony.
Jessica Hausner’s style is as clinical as her main character’s appearance and register. The action takes place in a real world yet the street where Alice and Joe live, let alone the interior of their home, seems just as hermetically sealed as the strictly controlled environment of the laboratory and its greenhouse. (The film was shot in Liverpool and various locations in Hausner’s native Austria.) The plotting is correspondingly and artificially restricted. On the search for Bello, Chris is startled by the dog. During an argument at home, Joe hits his mother and sends her sprawling. A junior member of the lab team (Phénix Brossard) locks Bella in the greenhouse and she has to clamber out. These things happen – for immediate impact or to move the story along or, in the case of the domestic, to foreshadow Chris’s striking Alice later on – but leave no residue in terms of what the characters say or do subsequently. Hausner and her DP Martin Gschlacht repeatedly use a camera movement whereby two people on opposite sides of the frame are gradually excluded from it until the screen shows only the space between them. Hausner probably intends this to convey something important. The prevailing artfulness of Little Joe makes it hard to see in it anything more than her conspicuous technique.
I didn’t see Emily Beecham’s widely praised performance in Daphne (2017). She’s very accomplished here but you can’t help thinking it wasn’t the strongest field of female leads at Cannes last year for Beecham to land the Best Actress prize for Little Joe. She sometimes seems like a less animated Nicole Kidman (that’s not counting the zombified Kidman of Destroyer). Beecham is well supported by Kerry Fox, Kit Connor and Ben Whishaw, whose natural empathy and truthfulness give Chris a bit of ambiguity that the film badly needs. David Wilmot’s Karl wears jokey T-shirts but they don’t really work as an amusing counterpoint to his senior role in the lab. Wilmot’s bug-eyed look immediately suggests a mad scientist rather than an anorak. The suggestion of zaniness is wholly redundant.
27 February 2020
