Zola Review: A Fascinating Film Adaptation of a Viral Twitter Thread - Vanity Fair

A few years ago, I got drinks with someone I’d befriended on Twitter. We met at a dark bar, and engaged in some small talk. About a half-hour in, he frowned and said, “You’re not what I thought you’d be. Where’s the weird, funny guy from Twitter?” It was pretty mortifying, but it did make me think—and has made me think in the years since—a lot about how I present myself online versus who I am out in the real world. How much artifice goes into my Twitter existence, how many anecdotes sent out in search of likes and retweets really represent the truth of things?

Those thoughts returned to me here at the Sundance Film Festival as I watched Janicza Bravo’s new film Zola, which is perhaps the first feature film to be based on a viral Twitter thread. The author of the tweets is Aziah “Zola” King, who, in 2015, detailed a fraught trip she took to Florida with a fellow exotic dancer, Stephanie (whom she’d just met at Hooters, where Zola worked), Stephanie’s boyfriend, and a man who would turn out to be Stephanie’s pimp. It’s quite a tale, full of outsized characters and shocking violence to cut through all the bawdy humor.

But, again, it was just Twitter, right? The real story can’t have been that quick and zippy and chaotic. King herself has said that she embellished some for effect, already an admission that the stories we tell online aren’t always direct reflections of the truth. And now there is a whole feature film based on that thread, which takes more licenses and further complicates the Internet’s relationship with reality.

I had expected Zola to be a frenzy, a kinetic riot of sight and sound that rollicks along at the same clip that King’s original thread does. There are moments when Bravo’s film does zoom with that short-burst verve, little furies of gorgeously filmed action that are all the more shocking for the dispassionate way Bravo stages them. But a lot of the film is muted, making so much of the sordid things that Zola encounters seem almost prosaic. I wonder if Bravo—who co-wrote the film with playwright Jeremy O. Harris—is making a point there, showing how, in the immediate, these events didn’t have the discrete, mini-story snap of a tweet. They were just moments in unbroken real-time, preceded by others, and proceeding more. Only after the fact could they be framed as quick narrative pops. Real life isn’t quite so condensable into 140 characters, because it’s always ongoing.

Another thing that Zola’s surprising quiet does is give real human shape to the dramatis personae. Bravo is not a leerer, she does not seem interested in making outright fools of anyone. Things are played for laughs, of course, but the film always finds little flashes of personhood behind the antics. The movie is about sex work, the kind that’s entered willingly and the kind that is less so. To that end, there is a villain in the film, Stephanie’s domineering and menacing pimp. But even he, played with a crackling purr by Colman Domingo, is not a stick figure of badness. There’s a fullness there too, a credit to the way Zola treasures detail way more than broad gestures.

Bravo is aided in her disarmingly humanist mission by her cast. Domingo is a standout. As is the ever invaluable Riley Keough as Stephanie, a slippery-sly operator who is, yes, under her pimp’s thumb, but does have her own insistent agency. Keough has Stephanie speak in a Bhad Bhabie “cash me outside” patois that is certainly a risky choice, but it works for a character who seems lost between worlds and selves, blithely unaware of how all her affect might read to Zola and so many other black women. Stephanie makes Zola a mark, dragging her along on this wild ride under false pretenses, but the movie doesn’t entirely condemn her for that. It seeks to understand her as much as it does the rest of this scuzzy—but wholly, tangibly American—milieu.

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Zola Review: A Fascinating Film Adaptation of a Viral Twitter Thread - Vanity Fair
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