Zola

ZOLA   **1/2

Janicza Bravo

2020

IDEA:  Zola, who works as a stripper and waitress in Detroit, gets in over her head when she takes an impulsive road trip to Tampa with her new friend Stefani.

BLURB:  Increasingly, filmmakers have taken on the task of cinematically reproducing the visual idioms of social media, integrating into their films’ formal designs texting iconography and digital-style interfaces. It comes as something of a surprise that Zola, which has its genesis in a viral Twitter thread, is largely devoid of such devices. Outside of its soundtrack of dinging phones and the occasional diegetic screen, the film feels oddly detached from the medium through which its story was initially delivered. In effacing so much of the original mode of communication, the script by Bravo and Harris offers a fairly straightforward dramatization of events, emphasizing the escalating absurdity and danger of the circumstances in which Aziah “Zola” King finds herself over one nightmarish weekend. Bravo is less interested in how her perilous tale was consumed and shared in the online space than in how the events themselves illuminate the virulent realities of contemporary American racism, sexism, and economic exploitation. She is especially effective at sowing an atmosphere of clammy unease, making nocturnal Florida streets and homogenized chain hotels alike into sites of pronounced societal tension. This looming menace is more engaging than the characterizations, which feel overly attenuated despite the fiercely committed performances. What is perhaps most compelling is not anything in Zola itself, but what its very existence implies: a victimized woman taking control of the narrative with strength and irreverence, emerging as not only a storytelling sensation but a tenacious survivor.

Double Lover

DOUBLE LOVER   ***

François Ozon

2017

IDEA:  A troubled woman engages in a torrid romance with a therapist who happens to look exactly like her therapist husband.

BLURB:  An unapologetically overcooked pastiche of erotic thriller, loopy psychodrama, and Cronenberg-lite body horror, Double Lover is as intriguing as it is outlandish and unwieldy. What remains true is that Ozon knows how to establish and tease his concepts with flair; from his evocative labia-to-eye match cut to the profusion of mirrored imagery and temporal ellipses, he creates an unstable, ambiguous world of psychosexual neurosis, wherein bodily boundaries of inside and outside, self and other, fantasy and reality, become a blurred continuum. Here, the twin-double is a multivalent signifier of ego division, both a reflection and a refraction. Double Lover’s knotty logic is such that Chloé, through whose unreliable perspective the entire movie unfolds, fantasizes her own phantom twin as a more aggressive double of her male lover. Through the resulting gender-fluid triangle, she’s able to role-play as sadistic parent and masochistic child, working through both her fraught relationship with her estranged mother and the burden of her own unborn twin sister, physically and metaphorically lodged in her womb. The scenario is pure pulp psychoanalysis, its frequent risibility exacerbated by how Ozon plays it so literally in the context of Chloé’s therapy. If one can look past its heavy-handedness, as well as some of its gauche metaphysical explanations, Double Lover ends up functioning as an affecting allegory of repression, a visceral depiction of the process of identifying and expelling internalized grief. Ozon knows as well as anyone else that the cinema, the ultimate “double” in art, perfectly serves such primal drama.

In the Heights

IN THE HEIGHTS   ***

John M. Chu

2021

IDEA:  In Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood, a range of characters negotiate cultural heritage, love, belonging, and dreams of personal and social progress.

BLURB:  There’s something to be said of a movie that manages to sustain a level of raucous energy for nearly two-and-a-half hours. Rather than exhaust or oppress, this milieu of buzzing commotion is part and parcel of the infectious celebratory spirit of In the Heights, which bursts with an exuberant love of Latin culture, diasporic identity, and the immigrant communities that comprise the bedrock of America. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical shoots out of the gate from its opening number, a musique-concrète city symphony turned dancing-in-the-streets extravaganza, and from then on, pinwheels and ignites in an ingratiating riot of motion and sound. It might be easy to take issue with the fairly frictionless, anodyne nature of this party atmosphere if In the Heights wasn’t clearly designed to offer a vision of an urban immigrant utopia, an expression of ancestral cultural fecundity in which geographic distances are bridged and dreams are self-actualized. The story does not ignore sociopolitical struggle - gentrification, assimilation, and racism are all touched upon - but these are not the point, nor are they permitted to dampen the peppy mood for long. Sometimes, In the Heights is perhaps overly hectic, with Myron Kerstein’s breakneck editing too often splintering and obscuring the choreography in spatially chaotic flurries. It’s a testament to the film's winning performances, musical panache, and enormous heart that, by the end, such craft quibbles largely fade under the summery effulgence, as warm as the island sun in Manhattan.