Abel Ferrara (b. 1951) is probably one of the last great filmmakers whose oeuvre continues to elude the simplest definitions of the auteurist framework. For example, are we able to fashion an inventory of his leitmotifs? Of course we can: catholic iconology and cathloic guilt; a perrenial preoccupation for the act of producing moving images, especially digital ones; tangoes with the concept of Italian-American identity and a split between its two capitals, New York and Rome; a profound attachment to the most squalid tropes of genre cinema (policier, slasher movies, vampire flicks, horror film, rape revenge fantasy etc.), encased in what is otherwise an arthouse cinema mold. Can we claim that he has fetish actors? Of course we can: Harvey Keitel (unforgettable in Ferrara’s masterpiece, Bad Lieutenant, 1992), Christopher Walken (King of New York, 1990), and, lately, Willem Dafoe (especially memorable as the titular Pasolini, 2014). However, one of the few living directors who has ever had a shot at working with Madonna (in his chameleonic, self-referential Dangerous Game) never sold out: faithful to his modest beginnings, Ferrara keeps on making these small films, almost artisanal in nature, and at a steady fire, releasing no less than 11 (!) feature fictions and documentaries over the last decade. (One of the reasons why he left behind his natal America for Europe is because the latter continent is much more friendly to micro-budgets.)

Even so, there’s one thing that must be said out loud – there are few exceptions in his latter work that allow one to leave the cinema feeling content, feeling that you have seen a good movie; his is not a cinema of immediate pleasures (or of pleasures, period – even scenes regarding love or catharsis are always somehow sabotaged in his films) as it is one of frustration, of sudden downward turns, of harrowing uncertainty. After all, what is more Catholic than showing that, in fact, one cannot know, and has no way of knowing? Which also lies at the core of Zeros and Ones, presented today in the Official Competition of the Locarno Film Festival, a film which marks an end to the filmmaker’s cycle of collaborations with Willem Dafoe, switching him up with a scruffy Ethan Hawke playing a double role (the main one, JJ, and a secondary one, twin brother Justin). Shot in the middle of the pandemic, the film is steeped in its characteristics – extensive, languid shots of the empty streets of Rome; omnipresent masks and carabinieri; there’s even a few pretty bad jokes on the topics of digital addiction and sanitary measures – “Relax, we’re all negative”, some Russian agents quip towards JJ after capturing him; in another such scene, the hero kisses his partner after both take the precautionary measure of donning a single-use mask.

But, in contrast to Jude’s Bad Luck Banging, these pandemic-related elements oftentimes transpire as a somewhat facile, even boomer-esque artifice, rather than a pretext for creating an X-Ray of the present time – an ambition which is usually at odds with the rigors of genre cinema, always vaguely atemporal by its very nature. The present plot is of an action flick meets disaster movie with clear B-Movie tendencies (and it’s arguable to what degree said tendencies are acted upon on purpose – at one point, the Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican blows up in a series of explosions that were quite obviously superimposed in Adobe Illustrator) but, via Ferrara, also arthouse (hand-held shots, a huge amount of scenes – inexplicably – relayed in slow-motion, „dead time” lacking tension, poetical monologues, critical insertions about images etc.). It is exactly because Zeros and Ones is trying its hand at so many things that nothing really seems to come out of it by the end of the day, but this sort of ambition has a certain quelque chose to it, a certain tragic or idealistic seed at its heart – the film’s final shot is that of the filmmaker’s daughter on a walk in the pre-pandemic world.

All of which, of course, makes a proper description of this film’s plot seem so difficult that, alas, I am only arriving at it at the halfway point of this text, after laying out all of this groundwork. An unspecified disaster has happened in the universe of Zeros and Ones, one that borrows from the manifestations of the current crisis but which also seems to come on the coattails of a larger, Cold War-like geopolitical conflict. (And with Bad Lieutenant-like drug den scenes included.) JJ, who appears to be a spy with military training, arrives in the capital of Italy within this context on an unspecified mission, coordinated at a distance through Skype and which involves revisiting footage ostensibly shot on the other side of the world – which indicates that his brother, Justin (who at one point howls Woody Guthrie’s famous “This machine kills fascists” quote), has been captured by the enemy camp. His mission, which carries him throughout the corners of the Rome’s organized crime life unperturbed by the cataclysm, ties in with his attempts at figuring out whether his brother is still alive, as well as those to protect his partner, who is raising a small child (and it’s unclear whether or not the both of them are its parents), from the side-effects of his dangerous job.

Ferrara’s attempt at making genre cinema in the midst of the pandemic is, of course, commendable, what with so many taking refuge in the arms of essay-films, but what are doubtlessly the most interesting parts of this film are those which lied beyond his capacity to create fiction. The image of a deserted Rome during curfew, either coated in resplendent illumination, or dark and decrepit, traversed by an Ethan Hawke who thus becomes a spiritual brother to Vincent Price^[1], starting his walk from a desolate Termini station all the way to the steps of the Vatican. And what else can this image evoke than the unsettling image of the 2020 Catholic Easter service led by Pope Francis in front of a Saint Peter’s Square where there was not a soul to be seen?

For all of this film’s sins and wrongdoings (and there’s not a few of them at hand, similarly to the amount that Ferrara’s protagonists have to shoulder), there is a strange and hidden state of grace about it, one which the filmmaker always bids on in his cinema, and purposefully so – Zeros and Ones opens and closes on two webcam monologues by Hawke, wherein the latter one discusses precisely about how supreme ugliness and absolute beauty are capable of co-existing in this world. And let us leave no place for any exaggerations, because this film has really nothing to do with the latter category, being an oftentimes painful experience (and trust me, it’s not the good painful of Ferrara’s peak in the nineties) – but it evokes it in an almost Schrader-esque manner, which amounts to the feature’s singular success.

[1] In a clear parallel to The Last Man on Earth (1964), which was also shot in Rome – a cult disaster flick that was heavily revisited throughout the past year.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.