In Zola, directed and co-written by Janicza Bravo, a young waitstaffer at a Hooters-style restaurant makes a new friend who cajoles her into taking a weekend road trip to Florida.
With Zola, Bravo captures the brashness of King’s voice and turns it into a movie that works against all odds, a black comedy and crime drama that begins as a strippers’ lark and evolves into a NSFW saga of violence and sex trafficking.
You can almost hear the click when Zola swing by Zola’s apartment to pick her up, she steps out to meet them, her stripper garb packed into neat, sensible little tote bags.
Zola quickly susses out that Stefani’s “roommate” is really her pimp, and he plans to put the two women on the market together.
Harris—shows a lightness of touch in navigating the story’s quicksilver tone shifts, and the movie’s two leads bring their best: Even if it’s sometimes hard to like Stefani, it’s at least easy to see where she’s coming from; her ruthlessness is a survival mechanism.
At the club where she and Stefani dance on their first night of the weekend, a scrawny white hillbilly paws at her with his eyes while tossing her his idea of a compliment: “You look a lot like Whoopi Goldberg.” Zola fixes him with a blank velvet gaze, but there’s steel behind it.