Lovely Rita (Jessica Hausner, 2001) (Patreon)

My feelings about Club Zero, which are conflicted but nevertheless quite negative, prompted me to go back to Jessica Hausner's debut, a film that I recall getting quite a bit of love on the festival circuit back in the day. Lovely Rita does give a pretty clear idea of where Hausner came from, artistically speaking. That would be Austria, and although Lovely Rita is considerably less deterministic than a lot of Austrian classics from the past 25 years, one can indeed see Hausner working in the shadows of Haneke and especially Seidl. This is a film about Rita (Barbara Oskia), a high school girl who is desperately out of sync with her uptight suburban environment. 

Hausner drops us into her life in medias res, so we don't know why she's an outcast or dead-set on making trouble at home and at school. Granted, the film offers certain hints, like her overbearing, gun-nut father (Wolfgang Kostel) demanding a little peck on the cheek from Rita every time he sees her. Is something foul going on? We cannot know, but Rita's pious, doormat mother (Karina Brandlmayer), as well as the girl's casual use of sexuality as a means of forging human connections, all certainly fit the profile. In any case, Rita is surly, dejected, but also extremely willful. She thinks nothing of cutting class to hop on a city bus to go god-knows-where, just for a small taste of autonomy. And once she forms a genuine bond with Fexi (Christoph Bauer), a slightly younger, chronically ill  kid who lives next door, Rita proves incapable of distinguishing appropriate pleasures (e.g., dancing around like dorks to Moby) from exploitation of the weak.

There are comparisons to be made between Lovely Rita and Haneke's Benny's Video, as well as Seidl's whole Austria-is-a-reactionary-backwater shtick. But Hausner has her own style fairly early. She and her longtime cameraman Martin Gschlackt warp otherwise banal actions with sudden zooms or reverse-zooms, with tightly stitch Rita's behavior to her environment. Watching Lovely Rita, the immediate impression is that Hausner is adapting Fassbinder's techniques to her own purposes, but then again, some of the zooms seem so unmotivated by narrative activity that they actually recall Andy Warhol. 

Hausner does whatever she can to present a culture that is circumscribed and micro-managed, but erratic at the same time. Why is Rita's dad obsessed with closing the toilet lid? Why does Rita want to star in her school's production of An Inspector Calls that she locks her classmate in a closet during the show? And is Rita's attraction to the nondescript bus driver (Peter Fiala) as random as it seems? Lovely Rita falls between chairs, formally speaking, since its gaps in logic are clearly deliberate but don't always seem provocative or even productive. What Hausner does accomplish, though, is the frisson that comes with taking the bad seed / mental illness tropes of so much Austrian cinema and placing a young girl at the center. Rita's lack of affect and stubborn diffidence is all the more striking because she is surrounded by other young girls who are preoccupied with appearance and cordiality. Even when deep damage is evident, it's rare that girls are permitted to choose violence.