Jessica Hausner
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“Happiness Has Become a Kind of Ideology”: Jessica Hausner on Motherhood, Genetic Engineering, Being a Female Filmmaker and Her Sci-Fi Drama, Little Joe
Jessica Hausner’s unsettling and weirdly beautiful sci-fi drama Little Joe is named for the infertile red bloom that Alice (Emily Beecham), a scientist on a genetic engineering team, has developed as a supposedly harmless form of heroin: savoring its scent makes people feel happy. She has named the flower for her son (Kit Connor), and illicitly brings one home for young Joe to tend and talk to in his bedroom. What Alice supposedly doesn’t reckon with is Little Joe’s capacity for influencing whom Joe wants to live with as he approaches adolescence, herself or his father, her former partner. Or […]
by Graham Fuller on Dec 6, 2019 -
Cannes 2019 Dispatch 3: Little Joe, Liberté
Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner made her English language debut with the UK-set project, Little Joe, taking up science fiction for the first time in her career after previously exploring horror and the period drama in Hotel (2004) and Amour fou (2014), respectively. In the film, Alice (Emily Beecham) works at a corporate biotechnology lab with a team of scientists who aim to develop new breeds of flowers that can, with their oxytocin-rich pollen, elevate people’s happiness, friendliness, and sex life—an evocative and typically rich concept for Hausner that still manages to be supplemental to her exquisitely detailed and precise mise […]
by Blake Williams on May 20, 2019 -
We Won’t Grow Old Together: Amour Fou
There’s a lengthy sequence, something like the climax of Jacques Rivette’s 1969 L’Amour fou, when increasingly at-odds actress Claire (Bulle Ogier) and theater director boyfriend Sebastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) go on a manic destructive binge in their apartment, alternating sex with the decimation of their physical space, at one point tearing off the wallpaper and breaking down the wall to their neighbors’ apartment. This frenzy lasts for a considerable amount of time until Claire announces “That’s enough” — and just like that, a mutually toxic relationship hits its terminus. The delicate walls comprising the sets of Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou — covered with ornate, thin […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 18, 2015 -
“LOURDES” | writer-director, Jessica Hausner
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 2:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] For Lourdes the hardest decision was whether to make the film at all. This decision was so hard because I found the subject very ambivalent and difficult to treat. I wanted to tell a story like a fairytale but I didn’t want to make a naive film. I wanted to question religion and faith but I also really wanted to know and learn more about both without, on the other hand, being too soft with the Catholic Church. I wanted to make a film in Lourdes that […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
