The Bitter Kitten Movie Club: ZOLA (2020)

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Zola (2022)
Director: Janicza Bravo
Starring: Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, Colman Domingo, Nicholas Braun

Lorenzo had already seen it, Tom hadn’t, but one thing neither of us expected when we sat down to watch Zola this week was how much it would feel like a period piece. From its flip phones to its constant references – visual, oral, audial – to the late lamented Twitter or the ubiquity of Facebook, Zola feels exactly like what it is: a story of the 2000-teens; a legitimately viral tale from that extremely brief period when social media felt like the closest thing we had to a mono culture anymore.

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Based entirely on A’Ziah King’s bombshell Twitter thread from 2015, which stars off with the now-iconic line “You wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch here fell out?????? It’s kinda long, but it’s full of suspense,” Zola is something that probably couldn’t exist in 2026: a “lighthearted” tale of sex trafficking. To be fair, there’s considerably more to the story than that, although the main issue with the film is that it’s honestly not enough of a story to sustain a feature. King is a naturally witty and funny writer, which is a big reason for why her thread garnered such an ecstatic response to it, but there are times when the script, by Bravo and playwright Jeremy O. Harris, seems to struggle for something more to say or show. And while the earliest scenes of the film are legitimately laugh-out-loud funny, we don’t think any script could effectively pull off the tonal shift that occurs when it becomes clear just how much danger the two women are in. You can do funny stripper stories and funny sex worker stories, but you really can’t do a funny sex trafficking story on screen — unless that screen is on a phone and the story’s being told in 120-character increments by an especially witty writer. In fact, we think one of the failings of the script is that it doesn’t center King’s writing enough. Some of the funniest moments come when Taylour Paige recites one of King’s tweets verbatim.

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But Bravo is a talented director and the earliest scenes of the film, when Zola and Stefani are bonding over their dancing careers and developing little girlcrushes on each other, are highly entertaining and funny. In addition, she treats stripping a bit differently from the way many male directors would, allowing it to be almost an aspirational lifestyle, but definitely not damning it as a tragic or morally compromised one. Zola is one of a series of films that came out over a five-year period that showed a fascination with the life of a stripper (Hustlers, Anora, and The Last Showgirl are some of the others), but only Zola was directed by a Black woman, which gives it a resonance many of the other films lacked, especially in moments when Stefani is shooting rapid-fire AAVE (including a wince-inducing “nappy-headed”) at Zola (an absolutely hilariously stone-faced Taylor Paige), or when her pimp, played by Colman Domingo, informs Zola that she’s there to look out for Stefani, to which Zola replies “Who’s looking out for me?” Janicza Bravo knows there is no answer to that question, so she lets it hang in the air.

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Having said that, the film is lightly judgmental about sex work, in a way that was a little surprising to us, given how matter-of-fact and respectful it is toward stripping. That’s clearly because Zola herself is a little judgmental about it and because the script doesn’t add any greater perspective to King’s original thread. This is fine when Stefani’s presented as a crazy bitch and a user, but when it becomes clear that she’s in a situation that she doesn’t feel she can ever get out of, the film doesn’t seem to have much sympathy for her. The script also doesn’t have much interest in explaining Zola’s actions or how she was able to navigate the situation the way that she did. Again, this comes down to a failure to flesh out the story past the initial twitter thread. There are a million reasons why Zola might not have felt safe enough to leave a situation where she still had her phone and at least a thousand dollars in cash on her, but it never offers or implies any, so there are times when the story gets a little frustrating. King said in a later interview that she stayed in order to keep Stefani safe, which is a detail that the film could have desperately used.

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The cast is uniformly excellent. Taylour Paige grounds the story simply by keeping still and quiet when everything around her starts going crazy, a choice that quietly underlines that in this quartet of losers, she is the single most at-risk person and she’s constantly deploying the survival skills needed to navigate the situation. She’s also very funny, especially when she gets an opportunity to go off on Stefani (which she does, many times). Riley Keough is a revelation as Stefani, building an entire person that couldn’t be more different from her from the ground up and infusing every gesture and line reading with an understanding of exactly who this person is. Nicholas Braun was never more pathetic (in a good way) as loser boyfriend Derek. Colman Domingo does everything in his considerable power to make the pimp character something other than a cliche, and it’s good work, but ultimately, there’s just not much he can do with a violent Black pimp character that hasn’t already been done. Also, TS Madison gets a freaking hilarious monologue that we are legally and ethically forbidden from quoting.

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And finally, as always, we like to give a shoutout to any film’s costume design. Derica Cole Washington was a protege of the legendary Ruth E. Carter (Black Panther, and many others) and like her, she looks for ways to give the characters dignity while remaining true to their lives and offering up something worth looking at. We like how well she avoided any cliches about how strippers or sex workers would dress, including a refusal to put Zola in any kind of skirt, which gives a visual representation of the character’s refusal to do sex work. We like that she sourced multiple looks from ASOS, a cheap and flashy retailer for young women, giving them more of an “in the club” vibe than a hooker one. The blue plaid ensemble she put Zola in for most of the movie was a reference to both Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz and the iconic plaid outfits in Clueless, and both of those references are witty ones to make in a story about girlcrushes gone wrong and trips into dark and dangerous lands (Florida). More thoughts in our BKMC pod:

Further Reading:

Check Out the Full “Zola” Twitter Thread Ahead of “Jaw-Dropping” New Movie
Zola Tells All: The Story Behind The Greatest Stripper Thread Ever Tweeted
The “Zola” Story — Jess’s Side

Next Week: Wings of Desire

[Photo Credit: Courtesy of A24]

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