You want to hear how this bitch and me fell out? It’s kinda long but full of suspense. Zola (Taylour Paige), a Detroit waitress and part-time pole dancer and stripper, strikes up a new friendship with a customer in the sports bar where she works. Stefani (Riley Keough) seduces her to join a weekend of dancing and partying in Florida. What at first seems like a glamorous trip full of hoeism rapidly transforms into a 48-hour journey involving a nameless pimp (Colman Domingo), Stefani’s idiot boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and some Tampa gangsters led by Dion (Jason Mitchell) unwittingly befriended by Derrek while the girls are out earning dollars for X … It’ll be forty-eight hours before I know this nigger’s name. This dramatising of a viral Twitter thread (148 episodes, apparently) demonstrates how filmmaking can get to grips with the immediacy of social media yet plug into a well-worn genre. Hard to understand for, oh, the first twenty minutes, as Keough (jaw-dropping and extraordinary) adopts a horrifying black accent which even mystifies Zola (there are some subtitles for the Caucasian of thinking) and lures her down South where a big white crucifix and a Confederate flag momentarily unnerve everyone into a worried silence which even the blazing sunshine and beautiful blue ocean can’t pacify. Zola’s punctuating line to two of Stefani’s encounters mark her pervy witness statements: They start fucking – it was gross. It’s the faux-naif affectation of someone who knew all along this was a prostitution gig but that’s where the humour (black, in all senses) lies: the gaps and elisions in the tale-telling. Paige’s face is wonderfully blank as befits someone well enough versed in whore world to figure out how to make money off a white girl’s ass. That’s also where the commentary on social media stories comes in. Stefani is permitted her own, brief, Reddit contribution to offer her own innocent version of events, dressed like an Avon lady and losing the blaccent which Zola clearly thinks is racist – it might well be, but when X drops his act and becomes a Nigerian heavy that’s also a comment on sinister intra-black power plays not to mention the danger in such an enterprise: guns are introduced. The sex scenes are interspersed with a montage of penises and the girls preen before a mirror as self-absorbed as we’d expect of any selfie-taking millennial narcissists. Stefani’s bodily exchanges are not quite porn but done with sufficient ironic distance not to be salacious. It’s an audacious approach, blending a crime comedy about lowlifes with piece-to-camera appropriation of the source thread with no real narrative closure, like a lot of real-life joyrides. So it’s a road movie after all. This was originally supposed to be directed by the apparently ‘cancelled’ James Franco and we can see the links with his cornrow-sporting character in Harmony Korine’s similarly Florida-set black comedy Spring Breakers but his brother Dave remained on board as producer. Co-written by director Janicza Bravo with Jeremy O. Harris. Who you gonna be tonight, Zola?
mondomovies 