For roughly around 20 percent of its runtime, Janicza Bravo’s Zola is the kind of movie I feared it would be based on the full-court press from the A24 marketing machine over the last several months, even with all of the Sundance hype and critical fervor behind it. This imaginary (and much worse) film would have seen Bravo give into the worst stylistic impulses that have come to define much of modern filmmaking about the Internet: You know, GIF shit, notification noises, punchy ripped-from-the-net narration, and, worst of all, a failure to erect a narrative curtain between the project and its origins. Practically every single person who enters a theater to see Bravo’s film will be well-aware that it is based on a 148-tweet thread written by Aziah “Zola” Wells, an excellent storyteller and former stripper who captivated extremely online people in the waning days of the Obama Administration with the kind of South Florida crime tale that they’d have to pick up a mass-market paperback to get usually — they didn’t even have to pay money for all that excitement. Yet that veneer conceals a strong film whose stylistic flourishes only occasionally keep it from connecting with the audience, and Zola may be the right movie for us to have a collective conversation about how we talk about — and depict — internet storytelling on screen.
To be perfectly fair, you couldn’t have picked a better tale to try it out with. What a stellar, weird story it is, either as thread or film: Zola fits well into the One Wild Night Odyssey subgenre about as comfortably as a pair of relaxed-fit jeans, taking the often male-oriented narrative form (Good Time, After Hours) and centering it around a fast friendship formed between two women after one pivotal encounter at a Detroit fast food joint. While waiting tables, our heroine (Taylour Page) meets Stefani (Riley Keough), a stripper who is planning to go to Florida with some pals to post up at some clubs and make some money. Being a former dancer herself, when Stefani invites her along, she decides to throw caution to the wind and agrees. Hours and hours of drivetime later, she, Stefani, their mysterious “driver” (Coleman Domingo), whose name Zola only learns after a full day spent with him, and Stefani’s goofy-ass boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) arrive at a dingy-ass motel outside of Tampa, and that’s when Zola begins to realize that something is, in fact, up and off about their situation. What follows involves exotic dancing, thievery, illicit Backpage listings, violence, and betrayal, and, again, it would have made for a hell of a beach read.
Bravo certainly leans into the weird wonder of her locales, though her specific focus on these characters isn’t as likely to bring up concerns of exploitation or evoke a feeling of falseness, as other films attempting to capture this facet of modernity have in some corners (I.E., Spring Breakers). As alluded to earlier, some 80 percent of Zola is captivating, as she brings a casual and observational style to a lot of the extreme goings-on. This provides her excellent cast with the space to work their wonders, while she’s focused on capturing the grit and glamor of their surroundings. Page and Keough have rightly received a year’s work of accolades in advance of its theatrical release — Page being the kind of empathetic and strong-willed protagonist you really feel for when shit starts to close in around her, and Keough being the kind of charming person you meet one night and then, after a number of grating hours later, realize that she might not have your best interests at heart — and there’s not much more I can add to that chorus. But I can say that Domingo and Braun do really great work here as well, with the former’s odd blend of suave style and accented rage becoming a kind of Jekyll & Hyde routine by way of Joan Freeman, and the latter perfectly embodying a kind of pathetic lovelorn idiocy that’s instantly recognizable without curdling into pity or descending into straight-up mockery (he does get most of the film’s best laughs, even if you’ll feel bad about your giggles by the end).
But, typically, when you’re watching an adaptation of some Carl Hiassan novel or whatever, you don’t hear the sounds of pages turning inserted over cuts, or watch as spaghetti sauce ruins the rough on-screen equivalent of a page to try and capture that full experience of novel-reading as it is in reality for many (though perhaps some people would be hyped to see a film like that, and only a select few films can pull off that kind of metatextual divide and still entrance an audience, The Princess Bride being a notable example). Zola, on the other hand, goes out of its way at points to remind you of the novelty of the material that it’s adapting, a symptom of the newness of that particular method of communicative art with an established one like filmmaking. These flourishes are often grating, though a few of them have the puckish playfulness of the occasional aside in something like Michael Bay’s Pain and Gain, a similar tale of Florida crime which I thought of often while watching Bravo’s film. Both films concern the fetishization of the body and of its presentation, though Zola focuses mainly on the exploitation of such rather than Bay’s film, though they’re separated by an acerbic nihilism — a stereotypical attribute of Bay’s oeuvre, given that it’s how the man relates to the world around him as an artist — which is impossible for Bravo to approximate given how her perspective as the interpreter of these events often overlaps with Zola’s own (it helps that Wells is credited as an executive producer on the project, a privilege that plenty of films don’t grant to their still-living subjects).
However, Bravo is aware that pursuing “truth” is folly, especially with regards to Social Media, and aside from also carving out a big “mostly” in front of the standard “based on true events” title card, she acknowledges that there could be additional sides of this story is perhaps the film’s best aside, where Keough delivers a jokey to-camera diatribe, complete with reenactments, parodying the film’s opening moments from her character’s perspective. But they can’t compare to the moments of uninterrupted narrative within Zola where the magic truly happens: A tense standoff in hotel room swathed in red light, a montage of identity-shedding clothing changes in strip club mirrors when Zola’s about to head to the stage, or even the athletic beauty of the pole dance crashing head-on into the gritty reality of backwater “gentleman’s clubs,” grubby men insert dollar bills into your g-string as they tell you that they think you look like Whoopi Goldberg. I wish we could have seen that movie, free of the extra-narrative accouterments and in-your-face reminders of its origins, but what we’ve received from Bravo in Zola is compelling and thrilling in its own right.