Fairytales and Freudian Females

With five features, two mid-length films, and one video installation to her name over 24 years, Jessica Hausner has evolved from a maker of hermetic psychodramas to an internationally minded auteur whose meticulously detailed character portraits belie the breadth of their sociopolitical analysis. Her films, too often reduced by critics to austere exercises of the kind of studied severity so familiar to viewers of contemporary Austrian festival films, are far richer and more stylistically diverse than their immaculately composed surfaces let on: Hausner is the rare writer-director to utilize genre to articulate a fundamentally feminist existentialism. Her latest, the science-fiction parable Little Joe, is a particularly noteworthy example of her flair for reworking genre conventions. With ever-increasing ambition and formal rigour, she has slowly established herself as one of Europe’s most fascinating filmmakers, as capable of inverting masculine storytelling tropes as reimagining literary and historical source material to suit her quietly questing protagonists.

Hausner’s early films evince an interest in feminine identity and fraught family dynamics. Following a pair of mid-length narrative films produced while studying at the Filmakademie Wien, her first feature, Lovely Rita (2001), tells the story of a teenage girl (Barbara Osika) who, resentful of her parents and unable to connect with kids her own age, strikes up intimate relationships with both a younger boy and an older bus driver, neither of whom can relate to her growing sense of estrangement. Shooting on low-grade digital video, Hausner visualizes Rita’s story with a freely roaming camera, a copious and conspicuous use of zooms, and an elliptical editing structure that curtails scenes at a moment’s notice. These are traits that Hausner and her longtime cinematographer Martin Gschlacht (with whom she co-founded the production company coop99, along with Barbara Albert and Antonin Svoboda) continue to explore, albeit with a more stately touch. Along with their striking use of colour (already evident in Lovely Rita’s expressionistic range of yellows and greens), the pair quickly forged a creative dialogue that they’ve since developed into a unique visual signature.

In (2005), this language begins to take on the formal and aesthetic qualities we’ve now come to associate with Hausner’s work: meticulous set design, largely static compositions, and a colour palette dominated by reds. By several measures Hausner’s darkest and most enigmatic film, tells the story of Irene (Franziska Weisz), a young woman who takes a job as a receptionist at a remote lodge in the Austrian Alps, only to learn that the girl she replaced has vanished under mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, in the woods surrounding the hotel,