Zoom starts with the story of Emma (Allison Pill), a young woman who works at a sex doll factory who has grown insecure about the size of her breasts. She is also a comic book artist, and she’s started work on a graphic novel. That graphic novel is about film director Eddie (Gael Garcia Bernal), who after a long career of blockbuster hits, is trying to make an art film. That film is about Michelle (Mariana Ximenes), a Brazilian model who has dreams of becoming a writer. After leaving her unsupportive boyfriend, she travels to Brazil to find herself and write.
Here’s the twist: the novel she’s writing is about Emma. The film loops around itself as these artists craft stories about each other from different planes of existence. The stories are kind of about appearances, about the way that assumptions are made about people based on their bodies. But in the end, the film is mainly about the concept itself, the looping metafiction becoming the primary motivator for conflict and resolutions. It is a shallow for a film that talks so much about people being judge for how they look, but it’s kind of captivating anyway.
The film is kind of a meditation on how life affects art. It is Emma we first meet, and it is her dissatisfaction with her life that causes her to create Eddie. Later, it is her frustration that causes Eddie to lose something of himself. In turn, it might be Eddie’s troubles that cause him to make a film about a beautiful woman being told that she can’t be a writer. And Michelle’s experiences come to shape Emma’s stories as well. It’s an interesting idea that isn’t explored as fully as it could be. There comes a point where the film takes the easy way out in addressing the metafiction as it goes fully surreal.
In the end it feels more like a narrative exercise than anything else. But it’s a pretty worthy exercise. The individual stories don’t really get to be resolved in any satisfying way, but the film kind of manages to construct a means to resolve the premise itself. It’s hard to explain without giving too much away, but there is merit to the film’s construction. It creates three very distinct worlds with different tones and somehow manages to make them all feel like part of the same narrative tapestry. It is an engrossing cinematic magic act, if nothing else.
The scenes don’t always fit cleanly. It doesn’t use the same transitory devices in each of the three levels. But when the bits do fit together, it’s kind of exhilarating. It’s fun to see the real world of Emma transition into the cleanly rotoscoped animated world of Eddie. It’s fun to see Michelle directly affect the life of Emma through her words. The actors fully embrace the strangeness of this narrative. Allison Pill, Gael Garcia Bernal and Mariana Ximenes ground the film with their performances, keeping it real even as the world unravels around them.
Zoom might be described as an uneasy combination of Stranger Than Fiction, Waking Life and Inception. No matter how that turns out, the result is going to be pretty interesting. The film ultimately doesn’t pay off in truly satisfying ways, but the journey to the payoff is kind of fun anyway. It is, at the very least, a truly ambitious, audacious film that’s intent on showing audiences things they haven’t quite seen before.
My Rating:
