[yasr_overall_rating]
A multi-dimensional interface between a comic book artist, a novelist, and a film director. Each lives in a separate reality but authors a story about one of the others.
“Zoom” consists of three seemingly separate but ultimately interlinked story lines about a comic book artist, a novelist, and a film director. Each character lives in a separate world but authors a story about the life of another. The comic book artist, Emma, works by day at an artificial love doll factory, and is hoping to undergo a secret cosmetic procedure. Emma’s comic tells the story of Edward, a cocky film director with a debilitating secret about his anatomy. The director, Edward, creates a film that features Michelle, an aspiring novelist who escapes to Brazil and abandons her former life as a model. Michelle, pens a novel that tells the tale of Emma, who works at an artificial love doll factory… and so it goes…
Before I go any further in my article, let me make one point very clear. This story is brilliant, but absolutely and entirely NOT intended for anyone but a mature adult. While there is lot of very graphic sex and adult content throughout the movie, it is deftly used to advance the story and is very funny and a well-made piece of work. The pop art flourishes and engaging artistic style used in the animation parts of the film kept it fresh, interesting, and engaging.
As the stories unfold, we realize that all three worlds in the story begin to fall apart because the artist and sex doll factory worker Emma, is unhappy with her breasts. The “Newsroom”‘s Alison Pill brings Emma to life and starts the spiraling of the three stories into their silly loop-de-loop of meta-fictions. Emma wins my heart. She’s a struggling artist/cartoonist who sometimes takes her frustrations out on her fictional creations, who in turn are creating other worlds that influence her own problems. And so it goes into a spiral of increasingly lightweight crises that play out in both live action and comic book-style animation.
Emma, who works by day in a small factory producing heavy-duty sex dolls, surrounded by all those perfect plastic bodies, hanging on hooks around her, must have infected her mind, since — despite getting regular sexual attention from coworker Bob (Tyler Labine) — she is fixated on obtaining a superheroine-sized bosom. She does just that, thanks to an obliging plastic surgeon, but is almost immediately struck with buyers’ remorse and learns, to her chagrin, that she can’t afford to have her implants removed.
Angry and anatomy-fixated, Emma turns to pen and ink. Some time ago, she invented a fantasy boyfriend in comic-book form: Latin dreamboy Edward (Bernal), whose glamorous life shooting movies in Brazil is presented here via roto-scoped animation. Emma cuts him down to size, while shrinking his manhood to an embarrassing size. Edward’s penile dysfunction becomes a main facet of his portion of the story. I am still not sure I believe any reasoning that this ‘condition’ so negatively impacts the production of his current artsy, Brazil-set departure from his usual blockbusters.
“Zoom”‘s third narrative is the plot of Edward’s movie, in which a model named Michelle (Mariana Ximenes) has aspirations to become a novelist and heads to a beachside resort to write. Her entire sequences are not shot in the same style as the rest of the film. I suppose that is to make us believe that this is a movie-within-a-movie. The contrast is full of restlessly tilting odd camera angles and sun-bleached highlights. Its actually hard to watch but very necessary to the plot since it is Michelle’s writing that is inventing the increasingly dopey things happening in Emma’s world.
There’s no way for all this to resolve that isn’t fairly absurd. But Morelli’s light touch generally keeps the goofiness from becoming tiresome, especially given the help of the musical machinations of Kid Koala. These songs serve as tongue-in-cheek reminders that what we see is not being presented as reality, but as a fantasy of a fantasy who isn’t quite sure what’s sexy and what’s just gratuitous skinema.
In select theaters Friday, September 2nd
