Rita (Barbara Osika) is a wilful, unruly teenager coping with a claustrophobic home life under her strict Catholic parents and an unhappy routine at school. Her sexual awakening leads her into a liaison with a much younger schoolboy (Christophe Bauer). When the boy’s mother discovers them in bed and curtails the relationship, Rita drifts into an affair with an older bus driver (Peter Fiala). After one night of intimacy, she never sees him again. Hopelessly lonely, Rita unwisely abducts her young boyfriend from his hospital bed for an evening, with disastrous results that precipitate an even more tragic turn of events.
Nothing to do with that classic Beatles song about a meter maid, Lovely Rita was the first film made by Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner, who went on to helm the drama Lourdes (2009) and horror-mystery Hotel (2004). For all the acclaim enjoyed upon its unveiling at the Cannes Film Festival, Hausner’s feature debut is an oddly amateurish account of adolescent alienation. Presumably by design, the film forgoes such niceties as scene-setting and character introduction and instead plunges us straight into a string of vignettes detailing Rita’s increasing sense of isolation from both her peers at school - glimpsed repeatedly rehearsing their production of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls - and her family, particularly her uptight father (Wolfgang Kostal), who keeps a loaded gun and a shooting gallery in his basement for reasons none too clear.
Shooting on digital video, not the super-slick hi-definition cameras we are familiar with today but the flat home movie aesthetic common to Dogme efforts of the time, Hausner achieves a certain intimacy although her repeated swish pans put the action closer to daytime soap opera. The film also features the most gratuitous over-use of the zoom lens this side of a Jess Franco movie. A generous viewer might describe Hausner’s storytelling as elliptical, but her film is so unecessarily vague about plot details, relationships and simply identifying supporting characters, it is hard to stay involved. Lead Barbara Osika delivers a performance that is hard to evaluate, either self-consciously awkward or simply amateurish.
In spite of this, Rita remains a plausible anti-heroine, the kind of girl viewers can recognise from everyday life. Some scenes do engage, such as the one where Rita and her underage boyfriend goof around to the sounds of Moby and scoff a box load liqueurs. Hausner mercifully does not strive for the kind of sensationalism practiced by Catherine Breillat or Larry Clark when it comes to detailing sexual relations, though her coyness regarding such matters leaves viewers more likely trying to work out exactly what is going on than recoiling in moral outrage. Despite the defiantly low-key tone pervading throughout, the would-be shocking third act is almost melodramatically downbeat, while the inconclusive ending provokes naught but an indifferent shrug. Surely the subject of teen alienation deserves something more galvanising than this?
