Stream It Or Skip It: ‘My Zoe’ on VOD, Julie Delpy’s Understated (And Undercooked) Sci-Fi Melodrama

Now on VOD< My Zoe continues Julie Delpy’s increasingly hyphenated career. We all know and love her for the Before and Three Colors trilogies, but for the last 20 years, she’s been quietly cultivating a career as a writer and director of small-scale dramas and comedies, the highest profile being 2012’s Two Days in New York (later this year, she’ll debut her first TV venture, On the Verge, for Netflix). Her latest is My Zoe, a risky and ambitious genre bender — and we all also know that such things can be take-it-or-leave-it affairs. Let’s see which it is.

MY ZOE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Isabelle (Delpy) and James’ (Richard Armitage) marriage is stone-cold dead, but the residual feelings are still smoldering. Their current sticking point is a custody agreement for their young daughter Zoe (Sophia Ally). Every meeting and exchange turns into an acrimonious verbal spat dredging up old arguments about what was said and done and not said and not done. Some nuts and bolts: Zoe is a grade-schooler. They live in Berlin because of James’ career. Isabelle’s a research immunologist interviewing for a new job. What went wrong between them? Everything — it’s complicated and convoluted and revealed in some clunky exposition jammed into arguments. And then she cheated, with Akil (Saleh Bakri), who she’s still seeing. Things maybe could be better if they let things go, but seeing each other inflames everything.

James pushes for another meeting with the custody moderator. She doesn’t want to go, because it cuts into her time with Zoe, but she eventually agrees. She gets a sitter. When Isabelle gets home, Zoe seems a little sick. Must be just a cold. But Zoe doesn’t wake up the next morning. Isabelle rushes her to the hospital, and James meets her there, and together they go through a slow-spiralling nightmare: Zoe has bleeding in the brain. She needs emergency surgery. She’s in a coma. There’s brain damage. Maybe it’s time to think about donating her organs. And James and Isabelle still fight, so acrimoniously, but there’s a point where grief just wears them out.

James is maybe starting to move on, but Isabelle — well, she knows a scientist with squidgy ethics. She goes to Russia to meet Thomas Fischer (Daniel Bruhl) with a proposition: Let’s clone Zoe. At this point we realize the technology in this setting is a step or three beyond our own, what with the smartphone that curls into a wristband and Isabelle’s high-tech lab glasses with digital readouts at the bottom of the lens. There’s discussions of motherhood and morality and the thrill of discovery, between Isabelle and Thomas, between Thomas and his wife Laura (Gemma Arterton), between Isabelle and Laura. How will all this go? I can’t say.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: My Zoe is somewhere between a sober Woody Allen busted-relationship drama (maybe Husbands and Wives?) and a near-future sort-of-dystopia saga a la Gattaca, Her or Never Let Me Go.

Performance Worth Watching: With this character, Delpy finds the three-way intersection of grief, despair and desperation, and builds a fourth road, hope, even though it may lead to someplace dark — and we believe all of it. She carries the film (almost certainly as she intended) and gives it focus, despite the screenplay’s shortcomings.

Memorable Dialogue: “If nothing is everything, then everything is nothing.” — Zoe gets philosophical during a discussion with her mom about the Big Bang

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: My Zoe begins as an unpleasant please-stop-saying-such-terrible-things-to-each-other broken-marriage drama, merges into a difficult-to-watch please-don’t-let-the-kid-suffer weepie and then slowly transforms into a subtle maybe-she’s-violating-the-natural-order-of-things sci-fi story. It’s quietly audacious in its narrative approach, Delpy holding together its disparate parts with her nuanced performance.

A scene in which Isabelle speaks of Zoe in the present tense when most reasonable people wouldn’t is sad and troubling, but understandable. That’s when we get the best sense of the film’s thematic tug-of-war — it’s easy to judge others from a distance, but when you’re closer to someone who’s in the grip of such great suffering, we can’t help but feel some form of empathy.

Delpy successfully pulls us into that conceptual moral morass, which seems to be the film’s point. But it only works in a fit here and a couple of starts over there, and is hindered by stilted dialogue that tends to handcuff the cast. It’s a high-concept film that Delpy approaches intuitively, its emotional drive trumping some of the more intricate details of a traditional sci-fi fable. It’s an approach that’s easy to admire, but never really comes together in a satisfying manner.

Our Call: SKIP IT. I want to be a good apologist and Delpyite, but My Zoe is undercooked despite its bevy of interesting ideas.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream My Zoe