@zola (Janicza Bravo, 2021)

[Never Cursed]

Zola is a sloppy, intermittently funny movie with a lot of surprises, one of them absolutely terrible. Riley Keough, Nicholas Braun, and especially Colman Domingo turn in fantastic comedic performances of utter incompetence and pathetic-ness (those unfamiliar with Domingo have a treasure trove of great supporting roles from the last few years awaiting them), rendering the misadventures of our central band of idiots as much cringe comedy as criminal melodrama. I guess I didn't think the film had enough of that relentless forward momentum that I expected of it (in terms of its direction it's more strangely formal than anything), but this is not the real issue with the film (and even those looking at reactions to it on, say, Twitter, will know all too well to what I am referring):

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The ending is one of the worst and most mystifyingly inconclusive I have ever seen in a film that purports to be finished and complete, so much so that part of me thinks that a The Snowman situation occurred and the film is missing sequences. After the last wacky setpiece event, the main characters are back in a car, they exchange a bit of dialogue, and... the film just ends in the middle of that scene, without any wrapup, denouement, or conclusion to the road trip that forms the structure of the movie. The pace at which it unfolds is so inappropriate and amateurish that, as the credits were rolling, I genuinely assumed they were a fakeout and Taylour Paige was going to interrupt them with narration. No such luck here. For what it's worth, I read the original Twitter thread, and it has an actual ending that tells you what happened to all the people involved. I have no idea why this film decided to just stop at the 85% marker.

[therewillbeblus]

I absolutely adored @Zola, which was more stylistically and formally grounded than Spring Breakers' surreal dunk into Florida's inebriating polluted air of disorientation, but still creatively thrilling in its playful experimentation with the medium's possibilities as melded with current technological invasions of privacy. The film is chalk full of audiovisual gags, using sound design to trigger social cues via phone alert noise, or administering an early oscillating tracking shot from a bird's eye view of both women doing their business in a stall in real time. It's a seemingly random -banal yet funny- inclusion that channels the film's intentions to expose the mirages of privacy, which Bravo is already doing by publishing a publicized social media story of private affairs. The thing is, this film and its characters understand that privacy is long-dead, and nobody mourns this fact. Instead, Bravo links the idea of privacy to the still-sought fallacies of trust and intimacy, feelings that are the very impetuses for Zola (and Derrek) to embark on the journeys they do.

From the moment the film begins, the idea of privacy is not only cast aside, but the film declares that its existence is rooted in unreliable narration- and as a late-act switch of perspective proves (in one of the most laugh-out-loud scenes I've seen in ages), truth in today's age of strong-willed narratives, spun out impulsively and narcissistically in the stratosphere, is inherently subjective. So what do we do with that information: That we cannot access another's truth? Well, this film toys around with that contrast between aloof observational humor and raw experience that is meaningful in its self-alienating sincerity. Zola's narrative kicks off in a moment of dreamy rapport with Stefani. It doesn't matter that they bond over (what we may see as) superficial commonalities- for like The Bling Ring, Bravo seems to understand that superficiality may be soulful to this population, and that we don’t need to access their existential essence to be curious and interested in their lives, or for their worlds to be insularly respectable to themselves. What matters is that Zola feels a connection that is authentic to her; she is genuinely liberated by this new friendship and excited at the prospect of an adventure with her new trusted, intimate sister.

Except Bravo quickly pivots from this chimera, to the disturbing- yet not surprising- 'revelation' that we can't trust others, and that intimacy is a lie. Even Zola (the most moral character in the film, of course, but quite possible only because she's the narrator!) influences her boyfriend with sex to get what she wants, mirroring Stefani's behavior towards her own beau. We judge Stefani's deceitful tactics as far worse because of whose lens we have to gather information- and because of the limitations of narrative, for the acuity of these events occurs outside of Zola's home turf where she ostensibly wields manipulative power herself over loved ones. When characters try to insult or ruin one another, they do so with superficial methods, by insulting genitalia size as a reflection of the targeted person's entire worth, or using social media to spread information about them vengefully (and conversely, the biggest compliments are about breast size- to kick off the central friendship- or about how much money one made for the pimp who will usurp the whole bundle). This film, more than any one thing, is about America- fictitious dreaminess sobered to the grimy anti-catharsis of lonely capitalist individualism when the fog of intoxication fades.

Everyone is playing a role here, from Derrek's culturally-appropriating, naive coaster, to Stefani's compassionate, loyal innocent. Though it's Domingo's X whose initial breakdown from his role erodes the jolly artificiality of the early narrative's ignorance, with a simple change of accent that serves as the puncturing Real, signaling an abrupt disruption of fun steamrolling into the horrors of reality. This is a world of selling yourself, of being sold, a melodrama of real life; manipulations replacing faux-trusting connections, isolation replacing community, capitalism replacing cultural affinity. There are scenes where Zola needs to turn her brain off to the unbearable terrors she's present for, and in those moments we again get technological stimuli acting as placeholders for the deafening silence that would normally fill these instances in prior eras of cinema: whether a tinnitus-emulating perpetual auditory ringing of dial-tone or a screen-saver image aiding Zola to tune out the violent or victimized consequences of sex trafficking she encounters in two specific scenes.

However, as distressing as this material can be, Bravo has also crafted the funniest film I've seen in some time, and one that I was genuinely laughing out loud throughout- even during some of the most horrific sequences. Her use of Bretchian techniques repurpose our current cultural trends to farcical degrees of cheeky transparency, such as when characters speak the text messages they're typing out loud- fusing their brewing harmony with dissonant exploitation of vacuous communication patterns. The juxtapositions sewn throughout the film are tonally rich, especially a montage of sex work that's depressingly pathetic without any opportunity for a reading of empowerment, yet propelled forth with a modish vertical movement of square images that merges cinematic frames with social media scrolling, culminating with a halted visual gag where we scroll back up to 'like' another example of vapid physical merit. These contrasts can be dour as well- particularly a late-act series of non-sequiturs, where we catch a long gaze holding a scenario of police repeatedly tasing a pleading helpless man on the ground long after the car has passed, followed up by a strange, sad musical act playing for a party of one in a motel lobby.

The observational comedy doesn't only exist in phantasmagoric smothering- in fact it rarely does. The aesthetic choices are never consistent, arrogating a regurgitation of the infinite litter of opportunities media can utilize to tell a story, to paint a feeling, to transform social media into artistic media. Derrek's absurd behavior is worthy of being laughed at, but he's also deeply tragic, whether pertaining to the ease of convincing him of a "truth" during interactions, or framing him alone from any semblance of the intimate narrative he deludes himself of having with his milieu. He's often shot from a distance, effectively conveying a cynical trajectory along the spectrum of comedy and tragedy- starting with a lovely Tati-esque visual gag in a top corner window early on, but a peer into a liquor store that diagnoses him as a fish-out-of-water is less funny, and ultimately a secluding pitiful shot of cleaning vomit on one's knees or nursing a near-fatal self-inflicted wound is devastating. Though these sad meditations only between bouts of banter that earns laughs in their repelling mesh of candied depersonalization.

This is how we've learned to watch movies- to part from the empathy to laugh 'at'- which happens to be the exact way we've learned to communicate with people in real life, or through the platforms of digital space that have become our recontextualized reality. @Zola treats events as irreverently as the Gen z Internet age of post-postmodern irony does - from murder to attempted suicide, sex trafficking to kidnapping- the horrific trappings are an experience and there's always some humor to be found in the endless gag of our endlessly intersecting lives, destined to be segregated in spirit and thus linguistically appropriate to ridicule, gawk at, and call a spade- at least from our vantage point of fatalistically distanced emotional connection. We make selfish declarations without self-awareness but with full external-awareness of what we can discern from limitless corners of perception in the digital age, and this film's grammar combines equally-filterless gratification from these freedoms, while wholly aware of the restrictions. This is not a movie to go to for attentively focused empathy, but it manages to find empathy in pockets by the nature of its peripheral trailing through eclectic processes of studying behavior.

I couldn't disagree more about the complaints towards the ending (which I've read several of, so Never Cursed is in good company), for this is not a film suited to wrap up with a coda, especially one granting us any 'objective' account of what happened to who. The film ends when The Crazy ends for Zola- right when Zola herself tunes out, as the events she's ignoring aren't stimulating or dysregulating enough to warrant a defensive screensaver or dial-tone to escape vis hypervigilance. We end when Stefani is spouting another lie, one she's heard. Blood is spilling, characters are absurdly declaring the others selfish with prognoses fixed in their own myopic truths. The film could not have ended in a more proper way at a more appropriate time, right when the intensity tapers off and we venture into the same recycled bullshit of self-indulgent characters trying to sell the others on their truths without an open ear to be found, elliptically on the other side of Zola's star-eyed enthusiasm that ignited the adventure. Her ears are now closed, her eyes exhaustedly disinterested in X or Derrek's shouting match, or Stefani's delusional love language that assumes Zola is an amnesiac. She is ready to look out the window, or sleep, or disengage from the now-trite, desensitized lunacy surrounding her. This is Zola's subjective story of her zealous Twitter rant, so yeah, cue the credits when she's tapping out of the safari.

[Never Cursed]

Everyone is playing a role here, from Derrek's culturally-appropriating, naive coaster, to Stefani's compassionate, loyal innocent. Though it's Domingo's X whose initial breakdown from his role erodes the jolly artificiality of the early narrative's ignorance, with a simple change of accent that serves as the puncturing Real, signaling an abrupt disruption of fun steamrolling into the horrors of reality. This is a world of selling yourself, of being sold, a melodrama of real life; manipulations replacing faux-trusting connections, isolation replacing community, capitalism replacing cultural affinity. There are scenes where Zola needs to turn her brain off to the unbearable terrors she's present for, and in those moments we again get technological stimuli acting as placeholders for the deafening silence that would normally fill these instances in prior eras of cinema: whether a tinnitus-emulating perpetual auditory ringing of dial-tone or a screen-saver image aiding Zola to tune out the violent or victimized consequences of sex trafficking she encounters in two specific scenes.

This (emphasis mine) is the most resonant thematic aspect of the film (one that I should have probably discussed earlier), and I suspect that the leftist reading of the film will be its most fruitful (certainly more so than the rah-rah empowerment line that I see in a lot of related articles). I suppose that from this perspective the film is fundamentally opposed to the sex work industry, not as a method of morally shaming its employees or even its clients, but as a way to posit that that industry is the cause of the misery of its employees as a function of its existence. Few other recent movies on the subject depict with more nauseating emptiness the violent alienation from one's own sense of self that results from being forced to sell sex in some form (skillfully adapted to film in the Instagram-esque prostitution montage). The only defense that its proponents in the film can proffer are hollow "hustle and grind" platitudes ("we makin schmoney," Colman Domingo throwing cash at Zola for her "financial innovations" while disallowing Stefani any reward, "money, titties, money, titties...") that do absolutely nothing to to make their deliverers or recipients any less violently unhappy

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culminating in Nicholas Braun's pathetic suicide attempt after being exposed as a witless mark who cannot keep "his" girlfriend safe, the worst thing one can become along such a capitalistic line of thinking.

Huh, going to have to think about my negative response to this one a little bit more...

[therewillbeblus]

See, I don't think @Zola is taking any didactic stand towards sex work or its 'industry' specifically- or certainly not an objective stance (which runs counter to the entire ethos of the film), and would be a lesser work for making that a core focus. As soon as she wises to the situation at hand, Zola states, "You do you, girl"- which I read as an earnest affirmation of Stefani's right to choose her lifestyle, just an annoyance that Zola is now selfishly trapped within a journey she did not consent to join. It's worth noting that Zola's actual tweets indicate a much more seasoned relationship to this lifestyle- and the film omits her admission that she went down to Florida two months prior and made 15K selling herself, just without the sex (as far as we know). However, the film is not sex work-positive either, but it is exposing the blurry line of empowerment and disempowerment when it comes to selling oneself, whether it be stripping, sex work, waitressing, or the personas we slip on to 'fit in' and be a part of culture, on social media, digital communication, or costumed in the flesh.

The film has a much stronger interest in cheekily disemboweling anyone's 'skills' in this game, through the eyes of Zola, who herself refrains from judgment on the acts themselves but has no patience for the stupidity, worthlessness, and deceit her peers posture at pathetically. Stefani and Derrek's characters are based on cringing cultural appropriation, and X is faking an American accent to fit into a part as well. Stefani's crocodile tears, lies of love to her boyfriend, pitiable recoiling from her pimp, and ultimate attempt to sell Zola on their bond are all scathed, as are Derrek's perfunctory efforts to intellectually grasp a situation or tangibly control an idea of his life. X's lines in the final scene disempower his own intimidating position and put him on a plane with the rest of them, as a man who is only as strong as his word, who deflates his empty threats by backpedalling, and then proves his delusional nature by demanding a person not to die because they are selfish! Zola's subjective perspective is empowered, a growing wisdom that evolves into a detached state over the course of the adventure, fitting like a glove with the arms-length solipsism we see others' exterior actions through on the 'net (and let's face it, just generally these days).

So while the film absolutely exhibits the horrors of sex trafficking, Bravo is more broadly exploiting the horrors behind the shiny curtain of the American Dream. This is shown in countless ways: the desperate futility of trusting another (romantic partner, friend, boss, caretaker), demonstrating that your protector won't protect you, you can't protect or obtain a person you believe you're obliged to, your friends will lie to you and themselves out of their own self-interest, and vice versa; the false freedoms of travel when susceptible to violent predators watching from the bushes, who may allure you through the wishful fantasy of connecting with new "friends" on the road; the tragic truth that your emotional unveiling means little to anyone else who can see through the theatrics as self-pity -which is why we both laugh at, and feel for Derrek, for he embodies our own understanding of how pathetic these fruitless pleas are, as well as our own identification with the exclusions that aggressively force our own feelings of alienation. Whether or not they are theatrically shielding authentic emotion doesn't matter to that part of us that deeply knows and empathizes with this injury (I could write an essay solely on how Derreck is framed by the camera in this film).

Bravo is showing a world where the social contract has long been set aflame, by capitalism and technology and cultural assimilation. However, it's probable that the contract was itself an artificial placeholder that, when absent, simply renders our default egoism transparent. @Zola sees cops beating a man on the ground and holds the camera on the incident from inside a car, knowing this is sad and demonstrating with the medium that in our subjective limitations we are powerless to stop it. We are then shown a two-person awful band playing for one in a motel, also sad, but kinda funny, and embracing the confinement of our finite perspective as we people-watch and can return to our own virtual or real worlds away from their sadness. The film sees Derrek alone mopping up his fluids twice, meditated on in brief harmonic despair, and then we hear him speak and we laugh, breaking from that empathy into our own aloof isolation. X is scary, a perpetrator of harm, but also a total fool. Zola sees all of these people and knows that they are real and capable and invasive, and then tunes them out when she's mobilized because they aren't worth her time no more.

What I love about this film is that it operates solely within a subjective space- recognizing objective issues and then casting them aside in favor of a personalized judgment. It couldn't be more accurate to our own processing, and because its chosen methodology is shamelessly intuitive, the film is allowed to be antihumanist without Bravo taking any such position against the dignity and worth of others as cemented gospel. As I've been arguing on this board for some time now, we are allowed to strip others of their worth if we understand that this moral accountability exists within our own subjective metrics, but the moment we pretend like we are omnisciently right about the dignity of others, this judgment becomes a problem. So no, I don't think Bravo is being didactic about sex work, but she is showing us what it can look like subjectively through the camera's and Zola's eyes, which we can see and we can believe as an equitable truth in one woman's perception, and then from there we can laugh at the absurd nature of the incompetence of man when we get distance from it, or bask in the pathos of our disintegrating culture when we're suffocated by it.

Perhaps the film is showing us that industries in general are inventions, capitalism granting some opportunities for empowerment only within a disempowering system; that one does not need to consent, because consent is also a mirage when we are enveloped in a milieu this aggressively narcissistic and intrusive; that we are becoming increasingly antisocial as we spend time on more platforms of ceaseless social interaction; more selfish as we engage with the world; more alone as we are exhaustively swallowed up by culture. The film is about ironies -specifically Gen Z's Everything Is Ironic attitude- but played to a tone we can all access. The greatest horror of the film is that Zola believed in the American Dream- that she witnessed the facades of her dream, and that the wild fun ride she promised herself towards liberated empowerment of body, spirit, and economy was crushed by intruding principals with other subjective perspectives and objectives that run counter to her own (signifying that relatable moment we've all had: Don't you know who I am? I'm the star of the movie of life- I'm the dreamer!). The greatest joke of the film is that, contrarily, Zola realizes that she took everything far too seriously- or rather that when she stops investing her soul into the lives of Stefani or Derrek or X, and begins desensitizing herself to their emotional needs or meaningless bombastic temperaments, she can breathe again and laugh it off and disengage from the narrative of the fallacious American dream. However, this truth- that turning our empathy off from those we deem unworthy with personalized evidence- is itself harrowing, and part of the necessary sacrifice we all make to harness our energy towards getting by a day at a time in a nonstop world of stimuli smothering our senses.

The objective version of the sex work industry, most industries, life paths, and objectives traversed on the road to the faux-American Dream, is anything but sensationalized entertainment, so the film's impressionistic strategies of subjectivity come in to pronounce that truth and also find imaginative methods to translate the internal melodramatization we crave, cannot inhibit our impulses to disgorge, and delusionally conclude as skewed realities of our own influences, projected onto the narrative onscreen. This is the narrative we concoct in our own fallible perspectives to paradoxically determine reality through bias. Sometimes it's anti- and sometimes it's pro-(enter: stimuli we are presented with).

And so, in the end, the film is not firmly anti-anything except for anti-objectivity, and not only because it does not exist within the unreliable narration of the film, but because it does not exist in any of our narratives anymore- not where it counts. We feel, dream, desire, hurt, accept, and cling to sensations that are individualized. It's how we get our information, how we formulate truth, and really all that we are interested in, and have the tools for, to create identities. @Zola is laying all of the pleasures and detriments to this fact bare before us, to laugh and cringe and detach and clutch at our observations and interactions with our social contexts, and the expected and unexpected consequences of living the dissonance between real experience and the ideological assurances of experience. But like any movie it has to end, and we need to go look at our phone or something. Stefani repeating the same BS with new data about its value, as time slows with no glimmer of novel arousal in sight, is as good a cue as any to roll the credits on this one.

[Never Cursed]

To be clear, I don't think the "point" of the film is any didactic stance or moralizing point about any concrete thing or institution, including the sex industry - I only think the particular critique I mentioned is nested within a larger criticism/understanding that you have done so much good work delineating above pertaining to the realities of existence in a capitalist world (the things that the film employs to disprove any idea of an "American Dream" existing in its world) and the pain that comes from having to survive there. In my comment about sex work, I was more noting a detail of that reading than saying that it was the whole point (and indeed I think part of the strength of the film's depiction of sex work is that many of its withering observations, its verbal "hustle and grind" platitudes especially, can be transplanted over to other situations and trades).

[therewillbeblus]

Absolutely- well said. I find myself progressively amused at what I see to be a deliberately self-reflexive choice by the filmmakers to portray Zola taking on a heightened passive or active role depending entirely on the circumstances that would fit her preferred narrative. She poses as doe-eyed and innocent during the more deviant situations (as well as present for them- Zola's tweets don't mention being there for either of the horrific scenes she witnesses/needs to bury with audiovisual defense mechanisms in the film!- yet another tally mark for her perceived victimization by Stefani's escapades), yet strong-willed in her interactions with the core principals- except not really; she only stands up to X with an empty look that her internal monologue suggests is emasculating for him- as if she can read his mind, or she interrupts our observations of the others' power dynamics in flux, that are physically excluding her, with nice mental character-assassinations reducing their worth to peanuts (hey, she can do that- it's her fantastical vision after all). She's invisible from the drama for the egregious illegal offenses (smart move! -there were times when I didn't spot her for what felt like ten minutes, as everyone else acted in bad faith with one another, even though we are clearly still seeing the film through her eyes- just ones that have no accountability in the scene), but she flips a switch to become activated with knowledge about how the sex industry works when it allows her to best the wits of those actually 'in the game' (which would question her character's displaced suffering in this underworld in a normal film that played by rules of objective narration). The initial twitter story wasn't nearly this melodramatic but Bravo is implementing the melodrama from Zola's voice and the inherent melodrama we cook up in our narratives, within the logic of cinematic melodrama, while maintaining awareness to the subjective limitations and, hilariously, endless possibilities of said melodrama. Oh, the endless power of one's imagination to craft truth!

[mfunk9786]

Loved this, for reasons TWBB has already catalogued and more. Best moment for me was a protracted unbroken sequence of one of the most beautiful actresses alive dancing (quite well, should add) and then a one-liner from an unexpected character right at the end of the sequence that feels like a punch in the ribcage, but is the sort of thing that other films going for an irreverent tone around this topic wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. Hustlers showed us the one time Usher came into the club and a bunch of goons in suits, but @zola is working in a seriously different and seriously dangerous milieu. Feels like a Sean Baker film in the best ways, perhaps without quite as much sugar.

[therewillbeblus]

If the one-liner you’re referring to is

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X’s girlfriend saying, “Do it” softly in response to Derrek’s threats to kill himself

I completely agree. Her delivery is intensely attentive yet monotonously dispassionate, like any passive detached voyeur on the Internet who comes across a shocking piece of stimuli and desires a selfish rush without considering the human being on the other side. It’s also quietly the zenith of Bravo’s juggling of horrific and comic tones, a moment where we laugh in sync with a bitter taste in our mouths, overlapping empathy with our ability to gain distance from the material in a tight grip without the space or flow previous instances in the film allotted. We can all relate to this depersonalized desire for entertainment, for stimulation via another’s wild self-destructive actions, and yet we also understand the pain and powerlessness on the other side. That objective-subjective line asphyxiates us with its blurry implications in the climax, which is yet another reason why the film so rightfully ends when it does.

[mfunk9786]

No, the one liner I was referring to is:

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You kind of look like Whoopi Goldberg

[therewillbeblus]

Oh you meant the end of the scene, not the movie. Yeah that was great too.

[tehthomas]

Besides hailing from the Detroit area, I have a weird connection to this movie. I know "Zola's" mom, as well as the photographer for the Rolling Stone piece. That this film has turned out to be possibly pretty decent has me even more intrigued.