by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Nicholas Braun
Intro:
… nothing short of brilliant …
“Movie based on viral Twitter thread”, on the surface, immediately reads like a bad idea. Sure, it wouldn’t be the first time Twitter content got adapted (S#*! My Dad Says, Chicago Party Aunt), and with fanfiction well and truly a source of ideas for modern cinema (After, The Kissing Booth), it could very well be that someone is trolling every single critic who has ever claimed that #LeCinemaIsDead. And yet, the end result is anything but a joke. No, with Zola, what writer/director Janicza Bravo has conjured into being here is nothing short of brilliant, and it’s far from a simple thing to explain how.
Bravo extrapolates the story’s social media origins into proper cinematic aesthetic through character, visuals, and what can charitably be called the story. Taylour Paige as the titular Zola plays the role as aghast voyeur, channelling the original thread’s amateur memoir to create pure reaction comedy. Whether it’s handwaving other people having sex in-story, or just being confused by Riley Keough’s Iggy Azalea-isms (yet another mystifying performance in a filmography crammed full of them), she may not be all that active within the story but her place in it is no less vital.
As for the visuals, Bravo and cinematographer Ari Wegner basically take a sideways glance at the modern state of found footage movies (screen capture of computers, smartphones and the like), and highlight the disconnect between real life and social media depictions of real life as being inherently psychological. The framing can get dream-like at times, further adding to the surrealism of the events.
Flippant remarks about the narrative aside, the way it delves into the sex work that forms the core of what Zola and Keough’s Stefani are involved in, feels like the next logical step from films like Hustlers, Tangerine, and even Magic Mike XXL, dipping occasionally into the performative spirituality of the latter while highlighting the ‘work’ in ‘sex work’ from the former. It creates the kernel of truth buried underneath the digital artifice that, again, is symptomatic of many a social media interaction.
Zola is as memetic as its source material, sidestepping recent cinematic trends to create one of the best translations of the internet to the big screen that has ever been attempted. And not just in terms of its source material, as the whole production is an example of and commentary on being permanently plugged into social media, and the extent to which it can disrupt how we perceive ourselves and others. Being able to turn a string of 140-character blocks of text into something this visually enriching shows Janicza Bravo as a filmmaker sitting on an incredible amount of talent and creativity; turn notifications on for this one.
