Zeroville – first look review

Things have not gone well for James Fran­co at this year’s San Sebastián Film Fes­ti­val. His new film Zeroville has been pulled from com­pe­ti­tion because it was (acci­den­tal­ly?) released ear­ly in Rus­sia, thus break­ing the rules. This cock-up is like­ly to be dev­as­tat­ing for Fran­co who, hav­ing picked up the festival’s top prize, the Gold­en Shell, for 2017‘s The Dis­as­ter Artist, must have been hop­ing he would do it again. 

One won­ders if he orig­i­nal­ly had his eyes on the Gold­en Lion, giv­en the film’s fleet­ing sojourn to the Venice Film Fes­ti­val, where its pro­tag­o­nist, Vikar (with a K) picks up an award for edit­ing a sleazy ​’70s porno. Thank good­ness that pres­ti­gious fes­ti­val doesn’t just hand out awards to dan­ger­ous, insult­ing trash.

Like The Dis­as­ter Artist, Zeroville is pre­sent­ed as an auteur’s hand-craft­ed love let­ter to Hol­ly­wood. One of the open­ing shots sees Vikar, played by James Fran­co sport­ing a mas­sive head tat­too of George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun, erot­i­cal­ly caress­ing a slab ded­i­cat­ed to Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor with his tongue. Vikar loves her and Mont­gomery Clift, being the stars of the first film he saw (eleven months ago), and gets vio­lent when peo­ple mis­take Tay­lor for Natal­ie Wood. Appar­ent­ly this is how one shows appre­ci­a­tion to cin­e­ma – by dry-hump­ing it.

Hav­ing dis­cov­ered the movies upon leav­ing a sem­i­nary, Vikar adopts Hol­ly­wood as his new reli­gion – he even car­ries an archi­tec­tur­al mod­el of a church around with him. Zeroville fol­lows his jour­ney of faith from his ini­tial pil­grim­age, through to meet­ing edi­tor Dot­ty (Jac­ki Weaver) while build­ing sets at Paramount. 

We watch this bum­bling, ​‘cine-autis­tic’ skin­head receive his film edu­ca­tion, which he soaks up as banal facts, recit­ing the fil­mo­gra­phies of the direc­tors peo­ple men­tion like a text-to-speech ren­der­ing of IMDb. He watch­es Sun­set Blvd. and My Dar­ling Clemen­tine with an anony­mous bur­glar played by Craig Robin­son who breaks into his home, and par­ties with George Lucas and Steven Spiel­berg as they argue about a prospec­tive robot-shark movie. Fran­co pan­ders to the ​‘movie geek’ at every turn, con­stant­ly drop­ping names with­out attach­ing to them any substance.

Mean­while Megan Fox turns up as ​‘Euro­pean movie star’ Soledad Pal­adin and spends most of the film in her under­wear, show­ing up in a les­bian vam­pire movie watched by a drool­ing Vikar through his editor’s mon­i­tor. Fran­co makes no effort to hide his male gaze, writ large and cel­e­brat­ed – as Will Ferrell’s pro­duc­er says, no one hires Soledad to see her clothed.

This filth grates all the more because the film is so unbear­ably smug. Fran­co is con­vinced he has made a mas­ter­piece, but his direc­to­r­i­al flour­ish is as del­i­cate and sen­si­tive as ​‘dis­as­ter artist’ Tom­my Wiseau’s. He begs for com­par­isons to cel­e­brat­ed direc­tors, par­tic­u­lar­ly through the neon glows which almost par­o­dy that favourite crit­i­cal buzz­word: ​‘Lynchi­an’. He even slaps the dream sequence from Eraser­head in the mid­dle of things just in case you missed the memo. Yet it’s dis­missed as ​‘weird’, as is Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Moun­tain, which cameos as Franco’s know­ing wink to the crit­ics – a moment between us cinephiles. No one in the press screen­ing laughed.

Per­haps the best exam­ple of Zeroville’s incom­pe­tence is a scene in which Vikar watch­es Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc for the first time. Inten­tion­al or not, it invites a direct com­par­i­son to a nar­ra­tive­ly iden­ti­cal scene in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie where Anna Kari­na weeps in an emp­ty cin­e­ma as she watch­es Maria Falconetti’s silent performance. 

The fram­ing in the lat­ter is per­fect, and wit­ness­ing Karina’s tear-filled eyes induces a more raw emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence than that on Joan’s face. By con­trast, Vikar is shot in pro­file, a blob of poor­ly-placed water on his cheek, inter­cut with shots from Dreyer’s film which have been cropped and zoomed in. If movies are Vikar’s/Franco’s reli­gion, then this is sacrilege.

As a bud­ding edi­tor, Vikar is dri­ven by the sto­ry of how The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc was pieced togeth­er after much of the footage was dam­aged. Dot­ty says, ​‘fuck con­ti­nu­ity’, and it is a dic­tum he lives by. So too does Fran­co – aban­don­ing all aes­thet­ic con­gruity, exper­i­ment­ing with oblique cam­era angles, lens flares, and colour fil­ters like a hyper Insta­gram­mer. But Zeroville goes fur­ther than its protagonist’s mot­to in that it says: Fuck nar­ra­tive; Fuck char­ac­ter; Fuck this film.