Zola
The wild true story about 48 hours in Florida - which Rolling Stone called The Greatest Stripper Saga Ever Tweeted - is now a film. The film’s UK premiere was screened as part of the Sundance Film Festival 2021 UK Tour, which picked a selection of films from last year’s Sundance festival to be simultaneously broadcast in participating UK theatres from 30th July - 1st August.
We can try and fight it. We can ostracize those around us who embrace it. We can even militantly monitor our iPhone screen time in an effort to reverse it. But it’s too late, the damage is done – we are now officially living in The Social Media Age.
How do we know that we’ve moved beyond the positive benefits and convenience of the Digital Age? How do we know that we live in a world where things don’t exist if they take place outside of the four walls of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the rest?
Because the hottest new independent film is based on a viral Twitter thread from 2015.
Films that are packaged as being ‘based on a true story’ used to be about things like the hunt for a notorious serial killer, the actions of a war hero, the courageous work of investigative reporters to uncover a scandal, or the trials and tribulations of an all-singing, all-dancing Austrian family who flee over the Alps to escape the Nazis.
You know, the usual stuff.
The latest release from A24 – everybody’s favourite independent film production company, which brought us Moonlight, Lady Bird, Ex Machina, Uncut Gems, and The Lighthouse – embraces society’s shift towards online content, where memes and tweets are as culturally significant as real art; a world where virality is the ultimate currency. A world where films can be based on viral Twitter threads. And be great.
‘Y’all wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch here fell out???? It’s kind of long but full of suspense’
- A’ziah King (@_zolarmoon), Tweet 1/148
Director Janicza Bravo’s Zola brings A’ziah ‘Zola’ King’s wild 148-tweet thriller to the big screen, starring Taylour Paige in what’s sure to be a breakout performance as the titular character. Like every good road trip, Zola’s journey begins during a waitressing shift at Hooters, where she meets Stefani (renamed from the real-life Jessica who stars in Zola’s thread). After the pair discover a mutual part-time profession as strippers and ‘vibe over their hoeism’ – her words, not mine – they swap numbers and part ways.
Alarm bells should perhaps have been ringing in Zola’s brain when it takes Stefani (Riley Keough) less than 24 hours to reach out and propose a ‘hoe trip’ to Florida, but she is blinded by Stefani’s Don Corleone-esque offer that she simply can’t refuse: ‘last month I went dancing in this cute spot in Florida where my roommate’s girl made five Gs a night’. A trip across America with someone you only met yesterday? Let me think about it. Five grand in one night for a few hours of dancing? Sold.
Stefani leaves Zola with one simple instruction: ‘Be ready by 2’.
This is where things really start to go south, and that isn’t a reference to the pair’s literal cross-country journey from Detroit, on the northern tip of the American Midwest, to Tampa, Florida. Accompanying them on the road trip is Derrek (Nicholas Braun), Stefani’s goofy, backwards-capped, chin-strapped boyfriend, and her ‘roommate’, X (Colman Domingo), a sharply dressed Nigerian-American who switches between a cultured American accent when he’s calm, and a thick African accent when he isn’t.
‘From here on out, watch every move this bitch make’
What follows is a 48-hour voyage through a wetland of prostitution, kidnapping, suicide, and murder that is hilarious and shocking in equal measure. To the uninitiated, the events of this wild weekend in Florida seem like they could only exist on screen, that this kind of thing could never happen in real life; but the way in which Zola has the capacity to deal with every new twist and turn shows us that this underbelly of activity is close to home, always lurking nearby for those who operate in the American sex work industry. Maybe someone has pulled out a gun during one of Zola’s nights dancing at the strip-club? Zola definitely has a few friends who have earned a lot more money by taking a private dance a little further than might usually be allowed. This life experience means she manages to avoid a complete mental breakdown during this rollercoaster ride through Florida’s underworld, and she even helps Stefani make some extra money when she realises that her in-call rates are nowhere near as high as she could get away with.
Zola is anchored by two sensational acting performances. Taylour Paige is radiant as Zola, dominating every scene with a performance that will undoubtedly open doors that should make her a regular contender for leading roles in years to come. Paige perfectly captures Zola’s deterioration from slightly-apprehensive-but-ready-to-have-fun dancer to a state of near-permanent side-eyed suspicion of Stefani and her entourage, then finally to the utter despair of the mess she has been tangled up in. She fully inhibits the real Zola, impressively nailing extremely difficult pole-dancing manoeuvres (so I’m told) and the even more difficult act of walking in 10-inch high heels (… so I’m told, honest), and her deadpan reactions to the ridiculous people that she encounters on the trip make for some of the film’s notable comic highlights, mirroring the humour from the original Twitter thread.
Paige’s commanding performance is even more impressive when you consider who she is sharing a screen with. Riley Keough’s Stefani is quite simply a walking, talking embodiment of cultural appropriation; a loud, brash, blaccented girl mixed up in all of the wrong things in an attempt to provide for her off-screen daughter. Though Keough’s Stefani initially appears unflinching and committed to the ‘hoe’ lifestyle, her vulnerabilities begin to seep through as Zola descends further into chaos. Keough is ridiculous, but not unlikeable, in a role that could go so horribly wrong in the wrong hands (see Franco, James: Spring Breakers). She is able to harness both sides of Stefani to make the viewer laugh, cringe, and despair at the very real predicament that a lot of young females find themselves in; call it (forced) prostitution, tricking, or trapping, but what Stefani (and the real-life Jessica) is embroiled in is sex trafficking, which is clearly heart-breaking and tragic. The fun, fluorescent Florida that Zola places the viewer in quickly fades to grey in a notable exchange where Stefani drops her act for a split second to ask X for her share of the $8,000 which she made in one night of prostitution. He gives her nothing, and that’s the terrible reality that real people face in the world of sex work.
Director Jaczinda Bravo stages Zola in a version of Florida where fluorescent neon signs, heavily tattooed Hispanic men, and phones that constantly ping with social media notifications are never far away – so pretty much the exact same as real life Florida. Ari Wegner’s dusty cinematography gives the Floridian fluorescence a hazy, lucid feel that is befitting of the locations used in the film. It’s not the vibrant, lively neon you might associate with New York or Tokyo; the tropical climate’s humidity doesn’t allow for anything that fast paced or energetic. It’s something different; it’s dated, like the motel that X books for Derrek to stay in while he takes care of his seedy business.
The lucidity of what we see on screen is expertly heightened by the film’s original score, from musician Mica Levi. Having previously composed the score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin and Steve McQueen’s Mangrove from his Small Axe series, Levi uses ascending and descending harps and string crescendos to give Zola a dream-like quality. The innocence of the score is assisted by randomly placed phone notification sounds, which remind us of social media’s omnipresence in the film’s world. This choice of score elevates the film and is a masterful decision; the well-trodden path would be to have eery, sinister instrumentation that could easily see Zola descend into melodrama territory, but what it does instead perfectly supplements what we see on screen. Levi even throws in some isolated synthesiser sounds that are typically characteristic of the mid-2010s trap and hip-hop that the film’s soundtrack – featuring the likes of Migos and Run The Jewels – contains.
A’Ziah King’s original thread went nuclear when it was originally posted, seeing her gain over 100,000 Twitter followers and be labelled the ‘Queen of Hoeism’ by sections of the media. The thread itself was described as The Thotessey, in tribute to Homer’s Odyssey, the epic ancient Greek poem that is widely accepted as one of the oldest pieces of literature that is still read by humans today; the definition of a classic. Everyone from MTV, Missy Elliot, and Solange Knowles weighed in on the thread that came to be known as #TheStory, and it has now given King her first credit as a movie producer.
In 2015, the thread would have felt like a one-off; a longform Twitter thread before the thread function even existed on the platform, and the reception and notoriety it received shows that it was a milestone in online culture. Six years on, a viral thread is now just another everyday occurrence that we see on our timelines; and the fake news agenda peddled by America’s outgoing president means that today’s audience is less likely to allow themselves to be swept up in a ridiculous 148-tweet tale, and instead question the authenticity of every facet of the story before it’s fully embraced, never mind made into a feature length film.
Zola is a relic of an era that is already over; an era before social media was taken so seriously, before its full power and influence was understood. That’s what makes the film so good – it captures a period of online innocence and suspended animation that allowed something so ridiculous to be taken at face value. And that’s enough for me; I already want to re-watch Zola.