In Rome, a city devastated by a serious terrorist attack, JJ, a solitary and enigmatic American soldier, tries to prevent other attacks while trying to find the trace of his brother Justin, who has become a dangerous anarchist. Prize for best direction at the Locarno Festival in 2021.
Posted at 8:30 a.m.
Integrating the pandemic into a story brought to the cinema is not an easy task. However, the prolific and always unpredictable Abel Ferrara (bad lieutenant, The King of New York) achieves this in this end-of-the-world thriller carried by an Ethan Hawke in great shape.
Here, in fact, the objects of the pandemic (masks, bottles of disinfectant gel) are not elements obstructing the story. On the contrary, they are one with it and constitute the sounding board for a dystopia well anchored in the 21st century.and century.
The masks perfectly echo this story in which the good guys are hard to separate from the bad guys. The Purell has a function of anointing, of purification in this city (Rome) sheltering the Vatican, seat of Catholicism.
The symbols, thus, multiply in this film that is both beautiful and elusive. Elusive, because the director, who essentially sets the action in the heart of the night, has built a plot intended to leave the viewer with more questions than answers.
Brilliant, its title refers us to a Manichean and binary world sticking to an expression once used by US President George W. Bush: “You are with us or against us. »
Ethan Hawke, who loves working in independent and offbeat films such as First Reformed by Paul Schrader, embodies both JJ and his brother Justin in addition to doing an off-camera narration that allows you to find some landmarks.
The direction of photography here is like a shadow theatre. The film is grainy, rough, harsh. The whole is so deconstructed that it looks like an experimental work. The deafening music mixes with a cocktail of violence, drugs, sex, torture.
When day finally dawns, at the very end, the viewer, stunned, practically breathes a sigh of relief. He came to see a movie. He had a destabilizing experience which was greatly nourished, it seemed to us, by the divisions of the Western society in which we currently live.
The most ironic thing is that Ethan Hawke appears at the beginning and at the end of the film to tell us that, yes, you may not have understood everything even if you liked what you saw. To this, we will add that you may also hate this thriller without a real hero. Certain thing, Zeros and Ones is remarkably unique.
In VOD
Thriller
Zeros and Ones (VF: Mercenary Brothers)
Abel Ferrara
With Ethan Hawke, Christina Chiriac, Phil Neilson
1:25 a.m.