How do you make a movie based on a series of tweets? By creating something that has the fleetness, collage aesthetic, and meta-commentary of 90 minutes of scrolling through social media.
That’s what director Janicza Bravo does with the cleverly constructed Zola; this is a tweet, a retweet, and a subtweet all at once, filtered through the lens of attention-deficit cinema. Based on a 148-post Twitter thread from 2015, which purported to share the details of a wild trip to Tampa that a waitress/stripper made with another dancer she just met and two random men, Zola consists of selfie performances, screen-capture shots, and literal notification whistles on the soundtrack. Narrating it all is Zola (Taylour Paige), who pauses the action on the screen from time to time to tag it with additional information or opinion.
The style would be hyperventilating enough; adding to the anxiety are the details of the story. The ostensible reason for heading to Tampa—or so Zola is told by her new friend, Stefani (Riley Keough)—is to dance for one night at a strip club that offers massive payouts. But it isn’t far into the trip—alongside Stefani’s dim, devoted boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and the mysterious X (Colman Domingo)—that Zola senses something amiss. Before long, and mostly against her will, she’s playing bodyguard as X sets Stefani up for a series of increasingly dangerous sex-work scenarios. A dizzying story told at a dizzying pace, Zola might register for some as a transgressive lark (it certainly has comic touches, including a montage of Stefani’s clients’ penises). My experience was more like a simmering panic attack; it’s “fun” in the same way Uncut Gems was fun.
The performances are pitched somewhere between sitcom caricature and cringe tragicomedy. Braun plays the clown; Domingo the looming threat. Keough, whose Stefani is a white woman trying to pass herself off as a combination of Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, has a vapidity that’s humorous and dangerous—for others and herself. Paige is the one who really makes this work. Her Zola, who is Black, finds herself negotiating identity politics, gender dynamics, and basic economics in each and every moment, doing so with a savviness that at one point turns the tables on X, the supposed pimp mastermind. Paige brings a seriousness to the proceedings, but somehow does it with a light touch. (I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another actor deliver a comic double take using only her eyes.)
Bravo’s previous film, Lemon—which traced a weirdo’s downward spiral after being dumped by his girlfriend—was also a visual oddity, to the point of occasional indulgence. Here, her instincts and subject matter feel better matched. Zola has a formal audacity that matches the performative personas of its characters, as when it takes a brief, amusing diversion to allow Stefani to recount her version of the road trip. (Mica Levi’s score, with airy twinklings that recall Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, adds to the aura of fantasy.) At the same time, the filmmaking subtly conveys the inherent inauthenticity of a life lived online, and how that inauthenticity easily spills over into our embodied experience. The movie plays in the gap between what we post and what we practice. Consider the curious shot that Bravo stages when Zola and Stefani stop in a gas-station bathroom. Looking down at them from above, the camera slides from Zola’s stall to Stefani’s, revealing their exposed bodies in a way that’s very different from their come-on Insta portraits (from this perspective, we even see their urine).
Presenting ourselves as something other than who we really are is nothing new. Social media only amplify this human instinct. A case in point is the moment in the dressing room of the Tampa strip club, where Zola looks at herself in the mirror and asks, “Who you gonna be tonight, Zola?” Bravo cuts to a montage of Zola in different stage outfits, multiplying her in a series of mirrors to emphasize the multiplicity of identities. With each “copy,” Zola becomes more of a curated object and less of a coherent human being.
The most human, authentic, and relaxed moment in the movie comes on the eve of the road trip, when Zola practices her routine on a stripper pole she has in her apartment. Unlike so much of the movie, there is nothing performative about it. There is no audience here; she’s only doing this for herself, getting lost in the craft and athleticism of her movements. It’s quiet, personal, and beautiful—though probably nothing worth tweeting about.
