Film Retrospective: Killing Zoe Is Stressful In More Ways Than one

Wanna scare your kids straight about the dangers of drug abuse? Have them watch Killing Zoe. The 1993 film by Roger Avary (who co-wrote parts of Pulp Fiction but never really got credit for it, it’s a long story) depicts life in ‘the real Paris’, and oh wow is it unnerving. The film follows Zed, an American safe cracker (let’s just assume that’s an actual occupation) who’s just landed in Paris to meet his long lost friend Eric. Before they reconnect, Zed spends the evening with an escort named Zoe, and they actually have a pretty good time together. This is going great so far! That is until Zed hangs out with Eric and his friends. As the evening descends into a nauseating delirium of heroin, cocaine, pills, and several metric tons of cigarettes, it becomes apparent that mild manner Zed doesn’t have as much in common with the anarchistic and slightly deranged Eric as he used to. The second act’s gratuitous narcotic excess is challenging to stomach, even in a way that Train Spotting refrained from. Things go from stressful to suicidal as the crew nurses their next day hangover by, naturally, robbing a bank. Eric’s alpha male bravado, psychotic underpinnings, and frankly comical incompetence does not make for a very successful heist. Soon Zed finds himself in an emergent civilian blood bath, that just happens to include his escort friend from last night. The two must find a way to avert Eric’s incendiary volatility if they are to make it out of the bank alive, and also, there’s dynamite.

Cult films tend to have a colourful and ad hoc history of production and Killing Zoe is no different. In the proceeding years, producer Lawrence Bender was scouting locations for Quentin Tarantino’s soon to be in production Reservoir Dogs. Bender came across a bank that he felt would be perfect to film in but wasn’t quite the right fit for Dogs. So he called up every writer he knew and asked if any of them were working on a screenplay that took place in a bank. When Avary got the call, he flat out lied and said yes. Two weeks later he had a rough draft for Killing Zoe ready to go. Being his first major film, everyone from the crew to the producers were unsure of Avary’s ability to pull off such a feat. Those funding the picture stayed on set for the first few days just in case they needed to take things over. However by day two they realized clearly their hesitations were unwarranted. Nearly all principal actors and crew commented on how impressed they were by such a novice director’s talent to make big decisions quickly and definitively.

Killing Zoe’s whole second act is an ode to excessive drug use, and even to those who don’t have an aversion, it will get to you after a while. Cigarette ash water is dumped from a glass and reused for a beer and that’s just where it starts. Zed teeters on the precipice of an overdose induced death for much of this sequence while Eric and his cohorts inexplicably feed him- literally feed him- more pills. Meanwhile Eric himself enthusiastically tries to leap beyond that precipice with a suicidal and cavalier approach to heroin. The film mirrors and symbolizes a reliance on heroin in myriad ways. As Zed opens up his bag of gear used to crack safe doors, it’s an allusion to a heroin kit, and the motions one goes through to shoot up. As Eric considers the prospect of facing down a cascade of police fire, he was directed to think of getting executed as the same thing as getting high; anything that gets you as close to death as possible will elicit the same response, even if one goes right over the edge.

This film has a very interesting sense of compartmentalization; from euro style love affairs in the first act, to indie flick self harm tales, to big bold American action films. That each act is specifically colour graded in different hues (all that of the French flag no less) further accentuates this. The tonal shifts are a bit jarring but are effective at accentuating the growing sense of unease and lack of control for Zed. As more and more characters are added into each act, Zed is less and less control of his surroundings and his agency, signalling that he is a fundamentally weak character. This is fitting as by the third act he is largely passive, leaving the narrative momentum to Zoe and Eric.

Speaking of Eric, Jean- Hughes Anglade is particularly great in his role, in how he slowly reveals his inner sadism. His slide from a merely obnoxious extrovert, into sinister misanthropy, and finally landing on an ornery psychopath is very well charted. His actions and intonations begin with cheerful banter hiding shades of malevolence; by the finale his script has been exactly flipped. This decent into paroxysms of violence is well represented by his deteriorating relationship with Zed. There is a profound joy in Eric when he and Zed reunite, later saying, in regards to the upcoming heist how he would only wish to do this with his long lost friend. As we reach the bloody finale and Eric has a knife to Zed’s face however, Zed sarcastically laments, “So I guess this is the end of our friendship?” Zed, in his most lucid and coherent point in the film, coldly replies, “Friendship? I haven’t seen you in 11 years, you don’t even know me”. Lest you think Anglade is a true monster, by all accounts he was absolutely lovely to work with. He even offered to film the steady cam car footage around Paris that bookends the film, assuring Avery that he was happy to do anything to help the film get finished.

Killing Zoe is not held in the same regard as the contemporaries of it’s era. Be that due to alienating European inclinations, the lack of supportive marketing, or more objective factors, it’s still definitely worth a watch. For those that miss the early True Romance/ Reservoir Dogs Tarantino era, Killing Zoe will definitely scratch that itch. Just make sure you say no to drugs!