Killing Zoe

Roger Avery – 1994 – USA

I like Killing Zoe more now than I did when it first came out.  At the time I bristled at its cheap nihilism and trendiness, it seeming to be little more than an outgrowth of the burgeoning Quentin Tarantino empire that was all the rage for several years there.  Tarantino produced it and it was written and directed by his writing partner Roger Avery, and it shares an actor with Pulp Fiction (1994), Eric Stoltz.  With time we can afford to be forgiving, though.  While it inevitably demands comparisons with Tarantino’s own Reservoir Dogs (1992) – both of them involving the aftermath of bungled heists – it can nevertheless be appreciated as its own entity too.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t burdened by the weight of its own coolness; it just means that it has few things to offer that aren’t rip-off’s, clichés and homages.  Stoltz plays Zed, (not to be confused with Pulp Fiction‘s infamous Zed, presumably), a low-level American crook invited to Paris by an old friend, Eric (Jean-Hughes Anglade), to take part in a bank robbery that he swears simply can’t go wrong.  Like Reservoir Dogs, the drama is all vitriol, with characters spitting, sweating and screaming non-stop.  The unpleasant mixture of comedy with sadism is transplanted intact from Tarantino, of course, as it is in all Tarantino knock-off films.  Zoe (Julie Delpy) is so idealized that she barely seems real; a call-girl who is not only sweet and gorgeous but falls in love with Zed for no particular reason and stays in love with him despite him doing almost nothing to defend her; in other words, she’s been invented by Avery as a woman who provides sex without needing to be romanced and then skips right to undying devotion to the point that she’ll submit to any abuse; the “perfect woman” apparently.  The dynamic between Stoltz and the French Anglade is very interesting; with Stoltz’s bland, laconic American-ness juxtaposed with Anglade’s histrionics as the out-of-control Eric.  Out of all the satellite Tarantino films of the early 90s – which include True Romance (1993), Natural Born Killers (1994), and From Dusk ‘til Dawn (1995), I think Killing Zoe holds up the best primarily because of its modest scope – (it doesn’t go off the deep end, like Natural Born Killers does, with its visuals or story structure) – and its interesting twist of being set in Paris and utilizing French actors.