Mia Wasikowska is teaching in a classroom. It could be in Hull or Helsinki. Around her, teenagers stare listlessly into the middle distance, wearing bright yellow jumpers and knee socks and pleated shorts, a uniform that could have been lifted from The Inbetweeners or The Railway Children. The scene is from Club Zero, a new film that premiered at Cannes a few days ago, but it could have been released in the 00s or the 80s, or the technicolour mid-Century. It’s ageless and placeless. Everything looks like this now.
This is the same aesthetic that you might have seen in Sex Education, or The End of the F***ing World, Infinity Pool or even in the early episodes of Netflix’s Black Mirror; primary colours, a mish-mash of accents; European-ish, no more specific than the Schengen Zone, transatlantic American, a regionless English twang. Sex Education in particular has defined the genre of the ‘where is it, when is it, why is everyone dressed like that’ aesthetic. “I think it visually elevates it to a slightly more expansive canvas,” the show’s Executive Producer Ben Taylor explained. He said the weird uncanny valley colour palette and styling choices (if everyone in the 80s had an iPhone stowed inside their dayglo puffa jackets) were borne out of a wish to make the Sex Education universe deliberately not rooted in reality; a utopia for teenagers, like something out of a comic book.
“I think the comic book comparison is a good way of looking at it and it’s definitely how I spoke to our art design team,” the producer said. “It’s funny, because I think we came out at a similar time to The End Of The F***ing World, which for me [does] a similar thing, intentionally blurring where and when it’s set, but because that comes from a comic book I think it was less questioned in the press.” And Jonathan Entwistle, director of The End of the F***ing World, said that his show, which features 50s style diners and 70s style ominous joke shops and eerie, empty houses that could be in any small town, in “any time from 1988 to 2006”. The effect of that is a kind of heightened reality, where everything is kind of off but we can’t put our finger on what exactly is making us feel that way.
What unites both those shows with Club Zero is that the aesthetic, the uncanniness of it, kind of calls to mind the trippy, this-is-not-my-real-life-yet feeling of being a teenager in a small town, any small town, in any era. Which is maybe why it works. In Club Zero, Mia – Miss Novak – is a strange cult-like, wellness obsessed figure who teaches her small group of students “Conscious Eating”. What begins as a Goop-style extra credit assignment spirals into madness when Miss Novak starts convincing the kids they can live on breath alone. Is it a good movie? No, it’s kind of tedious and it feels likely to be co-opted by pro-ana corners of the internet, and there is one specific scene so difficult and disgusting to watch that even the trigger warning at the beginning of the movie feels pointless. But the aesthetic softens that, or at least it tries to. It attaches, as Indie Wire writes, a “faux timelessness” to what is a weird and kind of lazy ‘Gen Z will believe anything’ cautionary tale that could otherwise have seemed ideologically out of date in about six months time.
Maybe that’s why this kind of technicolor, timeless aesthetic is appearing in more movies and shows, especially when they’re about the teenage experience, or aimed at Gen Z audiences. The fact these films and TV shows could be in the 50s or a not-too-distant future, in Copenhagen or Sunderland, perhaps means they can appeal to everyone, everywhere. They appeal too, as an aesthetic balm to the darker aesthetic favoured by blockbuster Hollywood these days. It fulfils a sort of nostalgia for… something, but something we’re not sure of. Something brighter and more beautiful. Filmmakers and showrunners can avoid the “iPhone face” criticism levelled against period dramas and can escape criticism over getting accents and place names right too. If it’s a satire, like Club Zero, making it look weird and contextless distracts us from the fact its satirical message might be kind of… unwise. It has a flattening, distracting effect for viewers. It’s CoCoMelon for people with a Mubi subscription. We just might have to get used to our screens looking like the inside of an IKEA showroom.