Yahoo Movies Zola film review: What’s funny about exploitation? You’ll be amazed
Inspired by an infamous 2015 tweet thread, this is a comedy about sex trafficking. What’s funny about exploitation? You’d be amazed.
Overnight, black Detroit waitress-cum-pole dancer Zola (Taylour Paige) becomes besties with a white, bubbly blonde, Stefani (Riley Keough), who suggests the pair can make big money in Florida. Alas, Stefani’s a pro and the road trip is a con.
Stefani’s Nigerian pimp, X (Colman Domingo), tries to strong-arm Zola into working for him, but she won’t play ball. Then guns enter the equation and Zola starts to fear for her own life as well as that of Stefani and Stefani’s clingy, disaster-magnet of a boyfriend, Derrek (Nicholas Braun).
“Cutting-edge” dramas about the sex industry often contain an Emperor’s New Clothes moment: when it suddenly dawns on you that lead actress is wearing Next To No Clothes and that, far from offering insights into a carnivorous system, she herself is being carved up like a piece of fresh meat. No need to worry about that here.
Paige has a conventionally lovely body. Yet Paige’s eyes (which are incredibly expressive) ensure Zola’s politically savvy brain is the centre of this universe. In Tampa, Zola performs a dance and goes into a kind of trance, hypnotised by her own strength, grace and all-round fluidity. Watch her stifle a sigh as a white punter shuffles up with his fistful of dollars and mutters, “You look a lot like Whoopi Goldberg!”
Meanwhile, Keough, who’s cornered the market in self-defeating grifters, gives a career-best performance as a woman who, when it comes to appropriating black culture, is not slow at coming forward. Stefani is racist, as well as dishonest, treacherous and (when not playing to the gallery) morose. But, thanks to Keough, she’s never one-dimensional. Even at her nastiest, Stefani is too magnetic and pathetic to hate.
One of the most powerful sequences, in fact, sees Stefani taking control of the narrative. In case you know nothing about the original tweets, written by then-19-year-old A’Ziah King, they were initially contested by Jessica Rae Swiatkowski (on whom the character of Stefani is based). Jessica gave her side of the story to Reddit and director and co-writer Janicza Bravo, working with playwright Jeremy O. Harris (Slave Play), weaves that testimony into the film.
The staging of Stefani’s pious to-camera monologue (a hilariously self-serving diatribe, in which she explains that she was too busy having a sexual relationship with Jesus to turn tricks) involves wild costume changes for Zola, re-cast as a slovenly, libidinous, Gone With the Wind-style farm-hand.
The mood is meticulous, if sometimes pleasantly bonkers. We get over-head shots of Zola and Stefani, while they’re on the loo, and are invited to compare the colour of their urine. Bravo cares about the state of Stefani’s vagina (spoiler alert, it is NOT happy).
The soundtrack, by superlative British composer Mica Levi, is fantastic. When Zola and Stefani first clap eyes on each other they’re serenaded by ironically sweet harps; the mood is drowsily magical. Later, wayward electronic sounds give way to primal, repetitive percussive beats that speed up, nightmarishly.
The production design is just as impeccable. Every pungent Florida hotel Zola encounters has its own, vaguely nauseating identity and X’s home, where he lives with his wealthy and extravagantly loyal fiance, Baybe (Sophie Hall), is classy in just the right way. The walls are adorned with black and white photographic portraits of X and Babye, arms entwined. Baybe resembles a Russ Meyer heroine and watches Meyer films on loop. She’s a psychopath, naturally, but, all credit to her, she keeps a very nice home.
Only one scene in Zola jars, mostly because it buys into titillating, heroine-in-peril tropes, but also because it’s preposterous. King has admitted she embellished a few elements of the trip. Her exaggerations don’t break the saga’s spell (she has Jessica’s boyfriend doing something which didn’t happen in real life, yet his actions feel plausible). Bravo takes things a step further, but her creative licence doesn’t pay off.
Luckily, elsewhere, she knows exactly what she’s doing. She frames the story as a romance between two women; a romance that fails, spectacularly, because only one of the women knows their own worth. Which is not to say that Zola ends on a sour note. Bravo is banking on the fact that we’ll fall in love with her gutsy and wry young protagonist and - swoon! - we do.
In cinemas
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