Review: Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones Is a Muddled Sermon on Imperialism

Abel Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones was shot in Rome during lockdown, and at its infrequent best it pulsates with a visceral sense of fear, paranoia, and loneliness. Ferrara seizes on a resonant premise as his starting point here: self-isolation, coupled with desperate parsing for information as to what Covid-19 is and when and how it can be vanquished, can lead people to feel as if they’re banished agents attempting to uncrack a cryptic mystery.

Ferrara utilizes the totems of the crisis—masks, empty streets, health and military officials at checkpoints—as a found apocalypse, which he connects to a 9/11-style conspiracy theory, and tops it all off with a catalog of his own fetishes. It’s all perhaps deliberately too much, and the film quickly collapses under the weight of the director’s pretensions. And yet, Zeros and Ones occasionally hums with the gutter maestro’s signature nihilistic obsessiveness.

The film’s atmosphere is astonishing, suggesting the Alphaville that Godard might’ve fashioned in the context of a pandemic, and you may wish that Ferrara had let his aesthetic do more of his talking for him. Working with cinematographer Sean Price Williams, shooting in Rome under the cover of darkness in night vision (with drones, phones, and various other devices), Ferrara fashions a nightmarish underground world of seemingly endless tunnels and murky alleyways, occasionally dotted with glimpses of iconic attractions.

Rome’s Colosseum, engulfed in shadows and offset in spare, garish neon light, has never looked more sinister, and Ferrara doesn’t hold the shot a beat too long, allowing it to reverberate in our minds almost subliminally. Faces are bathed in the light of electronic devices, so as to underscore the alienation and estrangement that technology can bring about. (Per the film’s title, digital technology is among Ferrara’s sources of ire.)

Zeros and Ones’s feverish imagery, accompanied by Joe Delia’s hallucinatory score, suggests that something catastrophic is always on the verge of happening. Into this nightmare world enters JJ (Ethan Hawke), an American soldier who’s trying to find his twin brother, Justin (also Hawke), a revolutionary who’s either imprisoned or dead depending on whom you talk to. In footage captured on a laptop that one of JJ’s many sources provides, Justin evokes Woody Guthrie’s famous message about his machine (in his case the guitar) killing fascists and asks his torturers, “How come no one is setting themselves on fire anymore?”

Justin presumably wants to topple the imperialist regimes embodied by the United States (and by his militaristic brother), and Ferrara lets Hawke go hog wild in these scenes, whipping up a self-righteous froth that’s littered with macho howlers. But this shtick might’ve been more effective had Ferrara supplied audiences with even a whiff of context.

Ferrara has played the impenetrable plot game before, most recently in Siberia, but in that film the various metaphors cohered, offering a moving portrait of a man in crisis. By contrast, Zeros and Ones is a collection of passing fancies, a half-digested greatest-hits reel with no through line. Despair over a potential apocalypse has run through most Ferrara films as of late, though Zeros and Ones is so incoherent that it’s debatable whether the Vatican has been blown up or is about to be, much less what the source of the apocalypse could be.

Elsewhere we get scantily clad women, drugs, torture, and a contrived moment between JJ and a “laughing Russian agent” (Cristina Chiriac) that continues Ferrara’s ongoing need to stage faux sex scenes between his real-life wife and his attractive leading men. In Tommaso, such a moment was kinky and erotic, but here it’s just another element in a muddled soup.

Had Ferrara provided even a suggestion as to the heart of the relationship between the two brothers, Zeros and Ones might’ve been a triumph. The notion of one actor, especially one with Hawke’s humanist credentials, playing both a Jekyll and Hyde of American tribal guilt is promising, but Ferrara doesn’t develop the idea. In fact, it’s quickly apparent that his political talking points, including a didactic visit to a mosque, exist to imbue lurid scenes of sex and violence with a suggestion of intellectual grandeur. Zeros and Ones, then, is the unwelcome spectacle of a bad boy attempting to apologize for—or, even worse, outgrow—his badness. Such half-baked self-rationalizations serve to neuter the film’s scuzzball, hothouse poetry.