Producers: Diana Phillips and Philipp Kreuzer Director: Abel Ferrara Screenplay: Abel Ferrara Cast: Ethan Hawke, Cristina Chiriac, Phil Neilson, Valerio Mastandrea, Dounia Sichov, Korlan Madi, Mahmut Sifa Erkaya, Anna Ferrara, Valeria Correate, Stephen Gurewitz, Babak Karimi and Carla Lucia Cassola Distributor: Lionsgate
Grade: D
Abel Ferrara’s films have always been an acquired taste, but even those who have acquired it may find “Zeros and Ones” hard to take. Shot during Italy’s pandemic lockdown, it’s unrelievedly murky in both visual and narrative terms, a fever dream that’s more like a cinematic nightmare. It does create a mood, but one that most viewers will yearn to escape as quickly as possible.
Ethan Hawke stars in a double role as an American soldier named JJ and his brother Justin. The latter is a revolutionary who has been captured and tortured as a terrorist, apparently involved in a plot to bomb the Vatican. JJ has come to Rome, which is in lockdown because of the pandemic (during which the film was actually shot), to find his brother—who may be dead—but, apparently, also to garner information about the threat to the Vatican.
The screenplay thus seemingly contains the germ of an “international thriller” plot, but in Ferrara’s hands it plays out so incoherently that it would be more than a stretch to refer to it as one. JJ wanders about from episode to episode. He visits a woman, presumably Justin’s wife, and a mosque, where a mullah informs him sagely that the conflict he’s investigating has been going on for millennia. He spends time with an elderly street person with a cell phone, who apparently serves as a conduit of information.
There are others who are part of the equation, though exactly how they fit in, except as figures of sinister control, is never clear. Some are powerful Russian oligarchs and government operatives (Cristina Chiriac is identified in the credits as the “Laughing Russian Agent” and Dounia Sichov as the “Serious Russian Agent”) and others are Chinese underworld figures who run brothels and deal in drugs. At one point JJ is forced at gunpoint to have sex with a woman, which apparently so excited cinematographer Sean Price Williams that he switched from his usual muddy monochrome to blazingly artificial color in a jagged montage contrived by editor Leonardo Daniel Bianchi. (The explosions, similarly, are handled with sudden bursts of light and booming sound from Joe Delia’s normally brooding score that suggest the poverty-row effects of forties serials.) There are a few other color sequences, seemingly meant to indicate the happy alternative to a conflict-torn pandemic world; in one, for instance, Anna Ferrara plays the “Girl in Pink Coat.”)
As for poor Justin, he’s limited to a few harangues in which he excoriates his captors with screeds about the evils of the entrenched system, including lines like “You hate trees!” He’s also burdened with quasi-religious overtones, though when he points to Jesus Christ as a revolutionary fighter, he adds that it’s unclear which side he was on; that suggests that the entire terrorist plot in the script might be an establishment device to foster fear among the populace, rather than a true act intended to destabilize the status quo. An insert that shows one victim being waterboarded also indicates the torture to which Justin’s been subjected before being led off, presumably to his execution.
It’s not remotely clear what Ferrara intends here. Perhaps the film is supposed to be a serious commentary on the nature of contemporary politics and society, or maybe it’s meant as a satire of conventional thriller tropes. Or both, or neither. Ferrara devotees will probably argue that it doesn’t really matter, that one should simply surrender to the ambiguity of it all. Other viewers—of whom there won’t be many—will likely disagree.
If you are moved to watch the impenetrable “Zeros and Ones,” however, do stay with it to the very end—not just when the final credits begin to crawl, but until they’re over and done with. That’s because it’s bookended by brief remarks from Hawke, spoken directly to the audience. In the segment at the start, he welcomes you to the film, in the fashion of the introductions sometimes tacked onto preview screenings, and he explains that he loved the script and joined the project because he believes it an actor’s duty to support the work of visionary directors. In that at the close he admits that he didn’t understand the script in the first place and, now that he’s seen the result, doesn’t know what it means. He does, however, offer two diametrically opposed interpretations of the film’s message before adding, “By the way, this is part of the movie” and clicking off the camera with the observation that, one way or another, it’s over.
For which we can all give thanks.