I have a fetish for well-done meta-narratives. One of my favorites, Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler…, has a post-modern narrative about the reader connecting with a girl by trying to read the same book, but they never get past the first chapter due to faults in the various publications. Along the way, they discover a vast conspiracy that prevents the public from getting the whole story. Each of the second-person narrative chapters are split between the first chapters of various novels they read, each chapter coloring the subsequent narrative chapters.

Really, meta-fiction engages my brain’s pleasure zone. I enjoy juggling distinct storylines that feed into each other, creating a larger world than a singular plot line could possibly contain. Cloud Atlas contains a meta-narrative across multiple eras that bends and curves around each other, which would make for a compelling film if only I could get past Tom Fucking Hanks. It’s themes of identity, culture, and discovery are rendered eternal by reincarnating, mutating and echoing through the various halls of time..

Like Cloud Atlas, Zoom is a meta-narrative with multiple stories feeding into each other, but these stories are all founded in Women And Gender Studies. Emma (Allison Pill) is a comic book artist working as a face painter in a Real Doll factory while fucking her fat boring coworker whose obsession with large breasts make her want to get implants. To stave off her ennui, Emma spends her evening drawing a comic book about her fantasy man, a sexy Latino film director named Edward Deacon (Gael Garcia Bernal) who changes people’s minds through the power of his penis. Normally, Edward is a hot director of spectacular Hollywood action movies, but, against the wishes of his agent and studio, he is striving to make an arthouse film about a model finding her true self after decades of being idolized for her body. Michelle (Mariana Ximenes), the model, is frustrated by her relationship with another hot dude who kills her dreams of writing by telling her that she’s nothing but a model. So, she leaves him behind in order to write the novel of her dreams about a comic book artist in a dead end job at a Real Doll factory…

This Gordian Knot of storytelling is simultaneously hedging bets and walking a tightrope. If one story doesn’t work, the other stories pick up each other’s slack. The three plots giving each other life while talking about how our emotional interconnection in a cause and effect cycle that can feed negativity and positivity into the world. Morelli keeps the film juggling with a youthful zeal, having less to say about storytelling than about intersectional feminist theory about the impacts of marketing and physical ideals on marketing and fantasies.

So, the meta-narrative and political ideals ping two of my key pleasure zones hard enough where a basic execution would likely score a positive review. But, Morelli creates three successfully distinct styles for each of the narratives. Emma’s section looks like a low-budget indie film, Michelle gets a high-gloss How Stella Got Her Groove Back feel, and Edward is animated using rotoscope with a distinctly hand-drawn feel that reflects his status as a comic book character but also makes Edward, the male lead, far more artificial than the two female leads.

Watch out for the quick emotional cause and effect as Emma’s waves of confidence in her own body effects Edward’s sexual performance which effects Michelle’s writing ability which effects… The circle is eternal and continuous, creating spirals upon spirals, never stopping with any one person. It creates a punchy comedy with a breakneck pace out of hell. It’s not hard to keep up, but juggling the various plots and their intersections is possibly the most fun I’ve had at a theater this year.