Zeroville

James Franco returns with a movie which spent a few years on the back burner before it could debut on this year’s San Sebastián Film Festival. The idiosyncratic Zeroville, anadaptation of Steve Erickson’s novel, was produced even before cult classic A Disaster Artist, a hit on the 8th AFF. Zeroville is Franco’s another surprising film about an obsessive cinephillia, which strongly resembles the paranoid and absurd style of Inherent Vice. The director plays a role of enigmatic, slightly autistic boy who comes to Hollywood in the late 60s. His mind is obsessed with the great American classics, his head is decorated with a tattoo which portrays Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift from George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun, and he smiles like Buster Keaton. He enters the irrational world of the Dream Factory with a pure affection for cinema and a large amount of naivety. One can sense the changing of the guard and forthcoming of the New—a new, different era emerges with a new generation of filmmakers, while the cultural revolution and political chaos burst nearby. Zeroville is an energetic, cinephillic trip, funny and multi-dimensional, which at times resembles Tarantino’s latest film.