Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara, 2021) (Patreon)

[This is EMBARGOED, just so's you know.]

Are you by chance one of those long-time Ferrara fans out there who hasn't really appreciated the director's recent turn toward classical high-art modernism? If so, rejoice! The half-assed, scattershot Ferrara is back, the one whose intellectual B-movies inspire embarrassment and awe in about equal measure. Following the career high point of Siberia, Ferrara delivers Zeros and Ones, a cheap (and cheap-looking) piece of lockdown cinema that should occupy approximately the same place in its maker's filmography that Redacted holds in Brian De Palma's.

In other words, topicality is not Ferrara's friend, since he communicates much more strongly in images than in coherent thesis statements. Depicting a time period somewhere between COVID and an unspecified future, Zeros and Ones is a film about global warfare and omnipresent terrorism, and the thin line between those devoted to protecting the old order and those laying down their lives to jump-start the revolution.

Ferrara has a way of depicting this duality that is, shall we say, on the nose. Ethan Hawke leads the mostly-Italian cast in a dual role, playing (I shit you not) twin brothers. The main story has Hawke as an American soldier working to flush out a terrorist cell in Rome following the leveling of the Vatican by a series of MacPaint CGI explosions. But about one-third into the film, we are taken to a dungeon somewhere, to see Hawke's anarchist brother (Hawke) being tortured while ranting about Freedom and The People and Democracy. At one point, he tries to lead his captors in a frantic chorale of "This Land is Your Land." 

To his credit, I suppose, Hawke plays all of this absolutely straight. Then again, part of the reason Ferrara's recent films with Willem Dafoe have worked so well is that he understands that Ferrara is bombastic and unhinged, and he plays the director's alter-ego with a bemused smirk, one not based in irony but in world-weary disbelief. This isn't exactly Hawke's wheelhouse. He's an actor whose sincerity has evolved of late into a kind of bitter disappointment, and so he's not really suited to Ferrara's gonzo, declamatory style.

For what it's worth, Ferrara is working through a whole host of themes here, even though none of them ever develop beyond a cursory signpost here and there. One idea threaded throughout Zeros and Ones is the imbrication of warfare with digital imaging, to the degree that they have become indistinguishable. From a Zoom call with a fellow spy (Stephen Gurwitz) whose murder coincides with a hitman shooting the screen he's on, to a thermal-image sex tape designed to compromise military-Hawke, the degradation of cinema into, well, zeros and ones, directly coincides with freedom's foreclosure.

Above all, Ferrara shows Hawke and others wielding Sony portable night-vision cameras mounted on hand-grips like weapons, rendering the invisible visible so that it can be most effectively pumped full of lead. This could have been the single idea Ferrara used to ground Zeros and Ones, which makes sumptuous use of ultra-low-light videography. (Regular cinematographer Ken Kelsch has been swapped out for Sean Price Williams, and it's mostly a lateral move.) 

But within its 85 minutes, Zeros and Ones feels the need to broach sex work, drugs, Catholicism, Islam, and of course the pandemic, which cameos here with pointed shots of Hawke getting his temperature scanned, washing his hands, and slathering on anti-bacterial gel. One can see what this film was supposed to be (a mostly abstract play of light and shadow riding into theaters on the thinnest of action plots). But Ferrara's greatest successes have been when he most fully gene-spliced the silly and the sublime. Here, he just oscillates back and forth, and I can't imagine many people coming away satisfied.