Zero had its world première at Beyond Fest, 30 Sept 2024
“In the beginning there was nothing,” intones a voice out of the darkness at what is indeed the beginning of Jean Luc Herbulot’s Zero. “Then zero became one. One became two. Two became ten. Ten became a million.” Next a digital count-up appears on screen, stopping at 110.9, which resolves into the display number on a radio where the 7am news on a Dakar FM station reports that a man has been seen in Plateau area “with a bomb on his chest.”
Whether that initial voiceover represents a rewriting of the opening chapter to the Book of Genesis (and therefore a recalibrated creation myth for global history), or just a conjuring of a new narrative from cinema’s shadows, it seems clear, right from the outset and even from its very title, that Zero is going to play a numbers game. For it will let one thing be added to another until, before the players or viewer realise it, massive, multiplying repercussions – like the waves radiating from an ocean or explosive device – have built up from the smallest of beginnings into a mass movement.
The one here is an unnamed American man, credited literally as #1 (and played by Herbulot’s co-writer Hus Miller), who wakes on a Dakar bus bound for Ngor Village with no idea how he got there (the last thing he remembers was getting into a cab from the airport to his swanky hotel), or indeed how he came to have a bomb strapped to his chest, its chronometer counting down the ten hours that remain before it will explode. A stranger (Jessica Lorraine), herself paid to play her part by yet another stranger, gives him a phone and tells him to put on its earpiece. Now he is receiving instructions from the same voice that opened the film – a voice that could belong to anyone, but that unmistakably has been provided by Willem Dafoe with, in equal parts, familiar bonhomie, wheedling mendacity and inevitable menace. After all, the person on the other end of the line has #1’s life in his/her hands, and like an all-seeing, all-knowing God (even designated by one character as “the man in the sky”), or perhaps like a director who alone holds the full script, this remote manipulator of events, with drone cameras for eyes and with well-researched leverage over everyone, has a grander plan that defies the scrutiny, let alone the comprehension, of the puppets whose strings are being pulled below.
Magaye CisséSoon one will become two, as #1’s pursuit – against the clock – of a series of five surreal, deadly missions will lead him to join forces with #2 (Cam McHarg), a tough taciturn US military veteran who is similarly bound to a time bomb and an earpiece. As these two involuntary comrades race across Dakar to fulfil their assigned tasks and hopefully to emerge in one piece, they will briefly encounter a series of colourful characters – wheeler-dealer Alpha (Charles Correa), popular wrestler Missile (Samba Mbodj), bar owner Rihan (Renaud Farah), young criminal Barka (Magaye Cissé), imam Cherif (Auguste Bruno Derneville), his son Onaye (Roger Sallah), historian and Koranic schoolteacher Daniel (Gary Dourdan) and a celebrity breeding ram named Emmanuel – all of whom have their own obscure parts to play in this elaborate plot. The desperate duo will also furtively turn to #2’s old comrade-in-arms India (Moran Rosenblatt) for help and hope. Yet as bombs go off all around them, and unrest simmers among the populace, the chances of these two making it out alive seem to be diminishing along with the countdown emblazoned on their chests.
Though constantly entertaining and increasingly confronting, Zero is as hard to pin down as the intentions of that unseen voice. For it is all at once a high-concept thriller with a killer premise not unlike the one that propels Evan Marlowe’s Abruptio (2023), an odd-couple comedy in which two very different, initially hostile strangers must learn to work together, and a Tarantino-esque ensemble piece full of chaotically criss-crossing stories, bold yellow intertitles (where every character named in text comes with an associated on-screen countdown) and rambunctious, literally explosive action. Yet it is also a city symphony, as #1 and #2, and viewers along with them, are taken on a whistle-stop dash through the parts of Dakar that tourists rarely get to see. Most of all, though, it is both a portrait of Senegal’s political realities, and a fantasy in which the external forces of imperialism, colonialism and neo-liberal globalism are reset to zero by an ingenious yet violent coup.
“We’re all born with a ticking clock,” Daniel will tell #1 and #2, “the main thing is that our death serves a greater purpose.” As these two men, both in their ways thieves, are faced no less with their mortality than with their morality, questions are raised as to how their small portion of time might best be spent. Yet Zero will prove incendiary as much in its ideological as in its existential preoccupations, ultimately inverting the flow of propaganda, manipulation and terrorism to interrogate both the pernicious, meddling rapine of the West, and the true worth of its countless victims’ lives. Herbulot suggests that those around the globe who have been marginalised, exploited and dispossessed by capitalist imperatives are primed to explode, if only someone (God, the director, an anonymous agent provocateur) would light the fuse. With Saloum (2021) and now this, Herbulot is putting Senegal front and centre on a newly rewritten cinematic map, and leading his own world-changing revolution both by the proxy of filmmaking, and by the numbers of genre.
strap: Jean Luc Herbulot’s rambunctious, genre-fied city symphony primes two American strangers to play a small yet explosive part in geopolitics
© Anton Bitel
