Zola (2020)

Directed by: Janicza Bravo | 86 minutes | comedy, crime | Actors: Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nelcie Souffrant, Nasir Rahim, Amelia Rose Monteagudo, Ari’el Stachel, Colman Domingo, Nicholas Braun, Jason Mitchell, Ts Madison, Tommy Foxhill, Ben Bladon, Tony Demil, Ernest Emmanuel Peeples, Joseph Sanders

What if you click right away with someone you just met? Stripper and mom, Stefani (Riley Keough), doesn’t mince words and after one chance encounter, likes Zola (Taylor Paige) as a ‘BFF’! That’s why Stefani loves to take Zola for a weekend in Florida to earn a lot of money with their strip acts. Stefani also brings her boyfriend and a family friend. However, Zola quickly realizes that two of the three fellow travelers are planning something different than was first promised.

The film ‘Zola’ is wonderfully unpredictable and pleasantly disturbed. Moreover, the story is a typical case of ‘the truth is stranger than fiction’. Director Janicza Bravo based her film on an argument between two women on Twitter. You can probably still read the tweets somewhere, but it’s more entertaining to immerse yourself in this movie version of it first.

The acting performances of the two lead actresses, Paige and Keough, are head and shoulders above the rest and take ‘Zola’ to dryly comical heights. Both actresses strike the perfect tone, which lies somewhere between genuine drama and parody. Especially when Stefanie and Zola are in the same room, it crackles with tension under the skin and slapstick is not far away. The speed with which Stefani takes over other people emotionally is not only funny, but also frightening at times. In addition, the way Zola reacts to Stefani is both believable and playful. Zola even takes advantage of Stefani a bit. The ambiguous relationship between the two makes the film a genuine whimsical piece of art.

In the first half of ‘Zola’, director Bravo uninhibitedly mixes film techniques with social media. This way you can easily get Instagram snapshots as well as symmetrical compositions à la Wes Anderson. As a result, online and offline life in the film seem to intertwine. Moreover, the language used is a mixture of street and internet language. At times this mix is ​​so hard to follow that the viewer gets captions right out of the box. Or Zola can easily break ‘the fourth wall’; she then looks straight into the camera to explain what another character really meant. It’s a shame that these postmodernist tendencies almost fade into the background in the second half of the film.

Bravo’s film does suffer from a number of flaws. The director isn’t really sure what to say about Zola’s ordeal, other than, this is kind of what happened. It may go a notch deeper than exciting bitch fights. Nevertheless, the film hints several times at a difficult background of certain characters and the pressure of the American rat race with social media as the latest driver. And while Colman Domingo plays the role of a shadowy family friend well, the fear of him, which is crucial to the plot, is not entirely convincing. Domingo’s presence depends a little too much on coincidences.

‘Zola’ resembles the raw and energetic American films of the brothers Benjamin and Joshua Safdie and Harmony Korine. However, this film is not just a feverish dream of tokkie scenes, such as ‘Uncut Gems’ (Safdie, 2019) and ‘Springbreakers’ (Korine, 2012). Bravo’s film also has a remarkably compassionate side. Think about how director Sean Baker looks at his lead characters in ‘The Florida Project’ (2017) and ‘Tangerine’ (2015).

Like Baker, Bravo doesn’t judge her characters. In the first place, she mainly shows understanding for her characters who struggle at the bottom of society. Bravo’s work comes very close to that of the Dutch director Sam de Jong, especially his American debut ‘Goldie’ (2019). All in all, not bad cinematic company for Bravo’s ‘Zola’.