The late aughts have been a very “Zeros and Ones” fecund interval for the American maverick director Abel Ferrara. From 2019 to now he’s cooked up three fiction options and two documentaries (one about him presenting one of many fictional options, “Siberia,” in Berlin).
It hasn’t been fully a matter of him having lots to say. Frankly, whereas it wouldn’t be truthful to state that the three fiction options, “Tommaso,” “Siberia,” and “Zeros and Ones” all say the identical factor, it’s, I feel, correct to name them variations on a theme. The theme is what precisely is happening within the coronary heart and thoughts of Abel Ferrara.
“Tommaso” was a half-pastoral, half-tormented portrait of a sober American artist dwelling in Italy, which is what Ferrara himself is. “Siberia” was a deep dive into isolation and nightmares—the title location is a bar run by the lead character. Performed, because the title character in “Tommaso” was, by Willem Dafoe.
“Zeros and Ones” returns to Italy. Certainly, its narrative hinges on one of the well-known and sacrosanct locations there. This film, too, contains a man in emotional isolation, performed now by Ethan Hawke as an alternative to Dafoe. In a way, that is Ferrara’s pandemic quarantine film. His “response” isn’t like all you’ve seen earlier.
It begins with a preface by Hawke as himself, speaking in regards to the image you’re about to see. It’s a clumsy, earnest, bizarre pitch (as we’ll be taught at the finish of the film, when Hawke addresses us once more, that it truly was a pitch, for crowd-funding). However, it’s essentially the most grounded the film goes to be short.
Shot digitally by Sean Price Williams as if he was in a contest known as “How Little Gentle Do YOU Want To Get An Publicity,” “Zeros and Ones” spends a chunk of time following Hawke’s character, an army man named JJ who’s stationed in Italy, as he wanders about, doing issues that guys in Abel Ferrara films are inclined to do. That’s being dwarfed in the expansive environment (an abandoned prepare station), visiting and having an enigmatic dialog with a lady, having a much less enigmatic dialog with a toddler, going to a seedy locale, and procuring narcotics there, and so forth. He additionally has fraught digital exchanges with indie movie individual Stephen Gurewitz—enjoying himself I suppose as a result of there’s his identity above his head on the laptop computer display—and data some ostensibly documentary video. “Shoot it so that they imagine it,” a superior officer tells him. Sooner or later an Italian lady asks him what he’s doing “in my nation.”
Earlier than we’re in a position to piece all this collectively, we hear pronouncements like “Jesus was simply one other soldier, one other battle casualty,” after which the query “However on whose facet?” We additionally are taught that JJ has a twin brother who’s being detained and tortured again within the USA. In reference to a supposed terrorist plot. Taking part in the brother, Hawke channels Dafoe at his most crazed, and yells issues like “You’ll be able to kill me,” “This machine kills fascists,” and “How come nobody is lighting themselves on hearth anymore?”
And we haven’t even gotten to the bombing of the Vatican but. (Is {that a} spoiler?) As described, all of this appears fairly on-the-nose—dumb even. The dual-brother bit is an extremely hoary manner of signaling duality, and the philosophical would-be adages bandied about make Dostoevsky appear as dry as William F. Buckley.
However, Ferrara’s filmmaking at all times has a blunt elemental power and conviction. It doesn’t fairly transcend the commonplace side of what he’s making an attempt to “say.” And but transcending isn’t the purpose—doing is. This isn’t simply guerilla filmmaking, it’s a form of motion portrayal. A literal journey to the tip of the nighttime.