Little Joe
Entry updated 6 February 2024. Tagged: Film.
Austrian/German/UK film (2019). Magnolia Pictures / Coop99 / Essential Filmproduktion / The Bureau / Arte / BBC Films / BFI. Directed by Jessica Hausner. Written by Jessica Hausner and Geraldine Bajard. Cast includes Emily Beecham, Kit Connor, Kerry Fox and Ben Whishaw. 105 mins. Colour
Plant breeder Alice (Beecham), working for a laboratory that creates new strains of plants for commercial use (see Genetic Engineering), develops a flower – named Little Joe after her son – that induces happiness in anyone who cares for it. Though made sterile, it soon begins to pollinate rapidly. After a dog that has inhaled the pollen begins acting strangely, it then starts affecting humans. First is Alice's son Joe (Connor), who has a flower illegally given to him by his mother. Soon test subjects and colleagues, including those who had been opposed to Alice's research, begin to eulogize Little Joe. Bella (Fox), the one unaffected Scientist other than Alice, theorizes that the flower is "deliberately" infecting people in order to propagate itself and that those people may be responsible for sudden "accidents" befalling anyone who opposes it.
This beautifully photographed film is a somewhat chilly variation on the Body Snatchers theme (see Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Austrian director Hausner works in a detached, emotionally distanced style that she shares with the likes of Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl, and which has become the default mode of recent Austrian Cinema for many international viewers. Here though it is unsuited to the basic silliness of the story, compounded by cinema's usual failure to make scientists talking about science sound convincing. There are some clever touches, such as the colour symbolism of Joe's bright red sneakers matching the flowers once he has become infected, and a typically good performance from Fox in a faintly ridiculous role as Bella, the inevitable ignored prophet of doom. Beecham won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival for her performance as Alice. [CWa]
links
previous versions of this entry