Alison Pill and Gael García Bernal both star in the upcoming film Zoom, but in different planes of reality, and with Pill appearing in live action while Bernal only appears as an animated version of his likeness. For, his character, a successful young film director, is Alison Pill’s sex doll manufacturer/cartoonist character’s invention. In part because the character — Emma — spends her days in a job rooted in men’s physical ideals of women, she, herself, has developed body image insecurities, and, in her alternative career as a cartoonist, has created an idealized and objectified man. The plot seems to begin to take off — with all of the meta components chasing one another — when Emma decides to either, from the looks of it, spitefully shrink or entirely remove Edward’s large cartoon bulge. The trailer for the film was just released, and can be watched below.
As /Film points out, with Zoom, Brazilian filmmaker Pedro Morelli takes meta narratives to a new level, though the trailer doesn’t reveal quite how multilayered it is: within the cartoon she’s created about the filmmaker, he’s currently making a movie about a model named Michelle, who’s writing a novel about a cartoonist named Emma. So, apparently while in the “reality” we’re presented with, Emma is creating the creator of the creator of Emma, Emma is herself a creation impacted by everything the creation of the creation of her creation creates. So if you’re prepared to have sentences like that running through your head, do proceed to watch the trailer and see the film when it arrives in theaters on September 2.
The film premiered at TIFF last year, where Variety said that “the part-toon pic’s neatly collapsing structure and pop-art flourishes ensure it’s never dull” and THR said “Morelli’s light touch generally keeps the goofiness from becoming tiresome.” It could be worth it for the not-quite-pairing of Pill and Bernal, both of whom have done great things in the past with exceedingly quirky rolls (Bernal in The Science of Sleep, Pill in Snowpiercer).
Watch the trailer: