Director Abel Ferrara returns with a new film about the pandemic and the coming apocalypse.
Soldier JJ (Hawke) arrives in quarantined Rome to find his twin brother Justin (also Hawke), an anarchist and revolutionary. During the search, the hero realizes that he is witnessing the inevitable end of the world and that very little separates him from becoming a brother.
“You can't kill me,” shouts Justin, lost in the basement, about halfway through the 85-minute clock, foaming at his mouth. He is tortured by a group of serious and dangerous looking men with a potent drug, a kind of version of a truth serum (it won't matter what the interrogating group wants to find out exactly). This is followed by numerous philosophical exclamations and impulses, demonstrating the breadth of skills and acting talents of the chameleon-Hawke, imitator of Willem Dafoe (muse-collaborator of the director of Ferrara). From the burden of monologues, it is this phrase that will remain and will be manifested both by the heroes and the author as a prayer, questioning, little satisfying answers, refusal to follow rules, including narrative ones.
It is hardly possible to get used to and join the on-screen, inner-outer darkness and sweeping pace of this short, incoherent project shot on a video recorder mixed with a quadrocopter. Ferrara, with the assistance of cameraman Sean Price Williams and composer Joe Delia, is immersed in the world of tomorrow with masks, antiseptics and the military around the perimeter, in the anti-romance of lockdown, where even indoors they kiss exclusively in protective equipment. The director laments the regime that has come and mourns the freedom that was once given, but at the very end finds out that all the restrictions are invented, and the spiritual crisis - energy-consuming, inevitable - liberates and allows reality to somehow be reconciled. The apocalypse is always the credo of Ferrara, the author of the cult "Bad Lieutenant" and "Kings of New York", who in the course of his career regressed to the underworld and constantly entered the territory of the ecumenical epilogue (for example, in "4:44: The Last Day on Earth"). Here he comfortably prolongs his galaxy of shell characters and their phantasmagoric or, conversely, grounded odysseuses (as in the recent "Siberia", "Tomasso", "Pasolini").
On the way to JJ, as in a militaristic tale, there are leading underground business entrepreneurs of Asian origin; fellow warriors with a passion for torture (vaguely reminiscent of Paul Schroeder's recent and more linear Cold Reckoning); sinister women from Russia, forcing Hawke's hero to copulate for the salvation of mankind to a folk sound. Strippers-Marxists, imams, billionaires with champagne and rifles - Satan's ball is palpably familiar, the cinema does not invite to it, but passes by, looking superficially, with idle curiosity. The lethargy alternates with the scene of the explosion of the Vatican, the final point of humanity, no matter how hungry and thirsty for the truth it may be, and the starting impetus of the film itself. Where did Justin go, did he survive at all? “He ascended,” the old woman in the cathedral replies, and it seems that she made the right choice, because there is nothing to hold on to for a long time on the abandoned, dumb and torn by internal contradictions of God.
The action of "Zeros and ones" is sobering occasionally, little interested in assessing the audience, and with noir abstractness it leads to exhaustion. The 70-year-old Ferrara, who once emigrated from the United States to Italy and exchanged Catholicism for Buddhism, is not involved in the edification of freedom of choice and religion, much less bombing those sitting on the other side of the screen with them. The director, in a curious, encrypted relationship, describes the impossibility of accepting an independent choice, the uncertainty in eternity (taken from that very Rome) and its always fragmentary finale. From the open city, only memories remain, a new era is here again, its inherent fear and blind search for freedom continue, their presence remains unshakable.
This article was sponsored by Teresa Lehmann
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