Anora, my most anticipated movie of last year, turned out to be one of the most disappointing movies of the decade. I was so sucked in for the first third but I kept floating further and further from the screen. So much potential is gradually sanded down, I kept having to refocus. It's not just baffling for its Oscars sweep but because Sean Baker showed so much promise before this; Florida Project is good, Red Rocket is excellent and neither have any of Anora's faults. Almost everything about this movie is aggravating: the photography is ugly, the editing is tedious, the story isn't engaging, the characters are annoying and uninteresting, the tone...ugh, the tone, is the most egregious offender.
It's like navigating the warm spots of piss in a pool as his first big comedic sequence is wildly out of touch. There's a detachment between what his titular character is going through and what he wants us to feel: we might know there's no danger for her, thus it's [meant to be] funny watching these goons bumble around, but she doesn't know that. To her, she might be killed or raped, even begging them not to tie her up...and Baker wants us to laugh during this. It's truly bizarre to see a filmmaker be so out of touch with his own material. This doesn't feel like Anora's movie, she's an afterthought, which is why her only moment of true characterization is shown at the tail-end of this story. Baker's virtue-signaling 'support' for sex workers under the guise of being "non-judgmental" flattens Anora. No, it's not a cautionary tale about sex work, but it's not discerning in any other way whatsoever.
Everything negative I said about Anora is flipped for Zola: I couldn't get enough of it. The kind of movie that could have been an hour longer and you wouldn't read a single complaint from me.
Based on a Twitter thread written by a stripper, A'Ziah 'Zola' King, Zola is a period piece that captures what it feels like to be chronically online: during a montage of penises one especially thick cock is given a flashing heart react. When we're updated on the time it looks like an iPhone lock-screen. Screenshots are taken of passing billboards. Certain lines are punctuated by the Twitter notification chirp. And, during an especially tense standoff, when tension starts to escalate Zola disassociates to a kind of undulating screensaver.
Shot with glorious 16mm and expertly lit, sharply edited with a firm command of tone from the jump, Janicza Bravo expertly establishes—and follows through—with this being Zola's story. And, since this is Zola's story, there's plenty judgment thrown around; Her freeze-frame observations or asides about what's happening, what happens off-screen or what will happen never lose pop. Everyone around her range from repugnant to pitiful but they're never not engaging and funny. I need to reiterate how funny it is because so much of it has me screaming every time I revisit it. Bravo uses the color of piss (and how people piss) as character exposition - no one is working on her level of sleaze.
There's a sequence where we see Zola dance and it's evident that she's not only good at what she does but she enjoys it. It's a sexy performance but it's also just downright gorgeous, the longer it goes on the more hypnotic it gets. After all this build-up of eroticism and beauty it ends with an old redneck giving her a tip and earnestly telling her she "looks a whole lot like Whoopi Goldberg." The way Taylour Paige plays Zola processing this comment, while slowly gyrating her crotch, is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.
So many moments play out like that: Bravo will build a scene only to knock it down with a well-timed punch-line. The amount of times this movie pulled the rug out had me constantly on my ass, perpetually amused. When it suddenly switches focus to 'STEFANI,' as she hijacks and retitles the movie, I was in the clouds the way I blasted off with laughter. It even took me a while to come down, too, with how it just keeps going. Riley Keough's performance is one of her more underappreciated turns. Stefani's blaccent and, more importantly, the one moment she drops it, is so fucking spot-on but so easily could be a bland caricature. She makes Stefani a fully realized human being instead of just a mockery: she, too, is giving a performance.
Speaking of performances and accents: Colman Domingo's X, with his aggressive paranoia, is probably the funniest character... but also the scariest. He is the epitome of this movie's tonal tightrope and it's shocking how well Bravo finds balance. His accent switch-up is funny until he coldly switches back and takes Zola's defiant power away, his out-of-focus mouth dominating the frame. Bravo knows how and when to empower Zola but also to show us realistic disempowerment.
Two POV shots show us just how isolated she feels: one is of a massive Confederate flag casually waving and the other is a black man being brutalized by cops. There's also a moment by the pool where X grabs her face and threatens her. One of the staff goes to step in but then reluctantly leaves and we never see him again. When she's asked why she wasn't looking out for Stefani (a job forced on her) she asks "Who's looking out for me?" Zola is trapped here but she never loses her agency in the story.
The same can't be said for Derrek and Stefani: everything about them is about ownership, even the way they express 'love'. She'll point to her heart and ask "Whose is this?" and he'll answer "Mine," then she'll do vice-versa to his heart, "Whose is that?" and, of course, he says "Yours."
This happens every time he has a meltdown about her doing sex work and lying about it; he vows to take care of her so she doesn't have to keep doing this. What Derrek doesn't realize is that he, too, wanted to pimp himself out: to Vine and YouTube. The whole movie he's watching videos on his phone of people hurting themselves on a loop and declaring "I'mma make movies like this someday," missing the irony that he'll be exploiting his body to keep Stefani from exploiting hers. It's not until the ending where X proudly proclaims he owns every part of Stefani—her heart, her tits, her ass, and her face—that Derrek realizes, on some level, X owns him too. So he does what he's been watching on his phone: he hurts himself. And that's where it ends.
For those saying it lacks an ending, I mean, objectively I can't disagree, but subjectively: not only does it end on a fitting thematic note, it ends where the Twitter thread ended, no more no less. If you want any more than that then you, like the entitled people on this insane road trip, think Zola owes you something.
She doesn't.
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