Few movies as action-filled as Janicza Bravo’s “Zola” are directed with such a heightened and refined sense of style. In that respect, “Zola” is similar to the films of Wes Anderson, but Bravo outdoes even Anderson in one regard. For Anderson, style is a test of character—whereas for Bravo, who also puts her protagonist through severe tests, style extends into a vision of the storytelling process itself. As a title card near the beginning explains, “Zola” is based on a real-life, “mostly true” thread of a hundred and forty-eight tweets posted on October 27, 2015, by A’Ziah (Zola) King, and the film’s combination of unhinged action and rarefied realization brilliantly reflects its distinctive origin without mimicking it. The eponymous protagonist’s point of view is ingeniously embodied in the movie throughout (with one audacious exception). What’s all the more extraordinary is that, while constructing such a self-aware story, Bravo keeps the movie loose and free, jumpy and jazzy, filled with hip-hop and doo-wop, spangled with effects and with high-wattage acting. At the same time, she ardently and unflinchingly pursues a virtually documentary-like portrayal of the story’s surroundings. For all its exuberance and energy, the film is a horror story of deception, exploitation, and coercion.
The film begins with a baroque flourish, as two young women, one Black and one white, sit side by side in a lurid fluorescent glow before an intricate bank of mirrors that multiply their reflections vertiginously. As they languidly do their makeup in synchronized gestures, the Black woman, Zola (played by Taylour Paige), breaks the fourth wall and addresses the camera with remarks that the white woman, Stefani (Riley Keough), apparently doesn’t hear: “You wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long, but it’s full of suspense.” The rest of the film is a flashback from this opening scene, starting with the day that Zola and Stefani first meet, at the restaurant where Zola is working as a waitress—Zola is waiting on Stefani, who talks to her with rapid patter and rude candor (beginning with compliments on her “titties”). A quick series of decorative and rhapsodic scenes show the instant bonding of the two women, with special effects involving candy-colored fantasy interjections and subtitles. Both also pole dance, and, the very next day, Stefani invites Zola to come with her on a road trip to Tampa, where they can dance at a strip club for quick money, and Zola impetuously accepts.
The first sign of trouble comes as soon as Zola gets into the S.U.V. with Stefani, her boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun), and another man, the car’s driver (played by Colman Domingo), whom Stefani introduces as her roommate but is actually her pimp. Soon after the foursome get to Tampa, Zola discovers that the pimp has marketed both her and Stefani online as prostitutes; when Zola declares that she wants no part of it and tries to leave, he threatens her with violence. (It’s a spoiler to mention his name, which is only revealed late in the film; IMDb calls him “X.”) In the course of the action, Zola highlights X’s deceptions and Stefani’s own part in the ploy (though she may have been coerced by X to lure Zola in)—and Bravo, in a series of sharp, quick interventions, uses freeze-frames as devices to set up Zola’s retrospective first-person address to viewers, calling attention to the web of misdeeds in which she’s been caught. (Unlike many more ordinary movies that, in the interest of suspense, withhold from viewers what the protagonist knows, “Zola” calls viewers’ attention to crucial information that was withheld from her and makes clear what she learned and when she learned it.) Under pressure and in the face of danger, Zola discovers inner resources of courage and keenly practical insights (plus the boldness to put them into action) that both maintain her own boundaries and help Stefani liberate herself from X’s yoke.
The substance of “Zola” is fiercely earnest, the situations alternately depressing and bewildering and menacing, yet the tone of the movie remains predominantly bright and comedic. The antic drama bounces and swings with the hyperbolic energy of a tall tale, one that has grown giddy with wonder and whimsy from the sheer fact of Zola’s having lived to tell it. (The movie is largely factual, though the names of characters other than Zola have been changed; Bravo co-wrote the script with Jeremy O. Harris, and they also relied on a report by David Kushner, in Rolling Stone, about Zola and the experiences that she describes and also somewhat embellishes.) The movie is more than a coming-of-age story, in which Zola brilliantly and bravely improvises in the face of trouble—it’s also a coming-of-voice tale in which she discovers her creative identity by telling the story in the form of her Twitter thread. Zola’s speaking voice is sharply etched, logical, and decisive in her dialogue and in voice-over interjections; her narrative voice gets an even keener cinematic embodiment in the styles and the details of the movie’s images, sounds, and, for that matter, performances.
Bravo relies on extended and often symmetrical takes, not with the geometrical severity of Anderson’s compositions but looser, with a hint of spontaneous discovery and its built-in imbalance. She emphasizes the graphic side of gestures and poses, movement and mounting tension, at a distance, along with the space-filling power of the actors’ presences and distinctively heightened vocal inflections. She delights in the expressively ornamental, as in a scene of wondrous, imaginative simplicity in which the foursome emerge from the car in the parking lot of a depressingly dingy motel. Two kids are playing basketball there, on the building’s second-floor walkway, and the ball’s bounces, obsessively repeating the pattern of two with a pause, serve as the scene’s on-camera music score, trouncing the power of any song that might have been overlaid on the soundtrack.
“Zola” is in part a road-trip movie, and Bravo delights in the sheer sight of the road, and in the curiosity and the suspense of travel. Yet some of the sights seen along the way offer far more than local color, as when the travellers are approaching Tampa, and Zola, looking out the window, sees a big Confederate flag flying roadside (and Bravo holds on to that image at rueful length, panning to follow it out the rear window). Later, in Tampa, during a dour trip to some dubious johns, Zola, Stefani, and Derrek all see a police siren far down the road, and the sound of the encounter—officers brutalizing and Tasering a man on the ground who is begging for mercy and crying for help—dominates the soundtrack for a long time, as the S.U.V. approaches and Bravo keeps the camera staring hard at the attack, once again panning as they approach and holding the sight onscreen through the vehicle’s rear window for an agonizingly long time.
What follows is another scene of violence—the violence of predatory men inflicted on women—which is the ambient constant of “Zola.” It’s here that Bravo delivers her most extreme, most daring, most scathingly sardonic vision of the world of sex work. As Zola tries to extricate herself from X’s coercion and to help Stefani benefit from it in ways that X would never allow, a montage shows the johns’ flabby bodies and stubby penises, the desperate heavings in pursuit of pleasure, and the grotesqueries of sex-faces, in a series of vertically sliding images, separated by black lines, that suggest a live-action parody of the erstwhile instructional medium of the filmstrip. It’s a vision of rubes overpaying grossly for a groaning but underpaying for what it costs the women who provide it. In an appalling scene of menacing violence, Zola becomes sharply aware of Stefani’s sufferings, and Bravo both finds an understatedly anguished visual correlate for the shattering moment and makes it the dramatic pivot for a dazzling sequence in which Stefani tells her own side of the story, hyperbolically, insultingly, with racist undertones—and yet with a desperate pathos that Bravo doesn’t miss. It’s Stefani’s effort to recover her own story and her own agency in the face of brutal dependency, gaslighting, and fear.
Race is a crucial part of “Zola,” in surprising and revealing ways. As much as Bravo delights in the display of extravagant acting, and in the characters’ exaggerated behavior and loopy mannerisms, she also subjects these flamboyant excesses to severe, insightful scrutiny. Zola’s exemplary gesture is the embittered glower of disappointment with those who surround her, and Paige radiantly conveys her dynamic thoughts in concentrated repose, giving Zola a trenchant, plain, and affirmative voice that cuts through the tangle of deceptions, a focussed gaze that takes in all the idiosyncratic, implausible, infinitesimal details that she’ll eventually bring to light. As played by Domingo, X is a master manipulator whose scheming extends to his very identity and gives rise to a weird, memorable stray moment (one of many), when his name is finally heard, and he forces his unwilling minions to chant it chorally. Braun’s reedy, uninflected voice meets at the crossroads of Nicolas Cage and Michael Cera, and he brings real poignance and physical comedy to the blundering ignorance of his puppy-like, uninhibitedly frenzied affection. Stefani, in her traumatized exuberance, her victimized victimizing, speaks in a seemingly unintentional series of stereotypes of Black English), and her mannerisms, which fly from the start like a red flag, convince Zola of a kinship that instead proves treacherous.
