In the Flesh: ZeroZeroZero

In a dead house, a dying man ignores his stooped, haggard reflection. Adriano Chiaramida plays don Damiano “Minu” La Piana as something between lich and mourner, his milky right eye reflecting a world in which he no longer has any purchase, his face and body ravaged by a lifetime of betrayal, violence, and struggle. For the sake of the 'Ndrangheta, one of the oldest Italian organized crime rings, he killed his son. For the same reason, he kills his grandson. In his final scene, we see him ruffling his great grandson Domenico’s (Samuel Vento) hair and playfully pinching the boy’s cheek. For all that the anguish on don Minu’s face when he kills his grandson Stefano (Giuseppe De Domenico) recalls the devastated terror of Ilya Repin’s Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, it doesn’t stop his knife. ZeroZeroZero shows us again and again the thousand ways in which we carve our own futures from the bone of life. Tuareg freedom fighter Tamil (Mohamed Ibrahim) kisses his son Brahim (Farid Larbi) and says with heartbreaking tenderness “You are my favorite son,” before sending the younger man to conduct a suicide attack on a French colonial population center. Later, we see Tamil cradle his newborn baby — another son — with that same tenderness as his wife (Ysmahane Yaqini) looks on with anxious dread and deep resentment.

Elsewhere, shipping heir and drug dealer Chris Lynwood (Dane DeHaan) struggles with the onset of his Huntington’s Disease, paralyzed by the knowledge of his own death. “I can’t have kids,” he tells Tamil during a tense car ride. “Or, I can, but it would be cruel.” Mexican Army officer turned cartel enforcer Manuel Quinteras (Harold Torres, giving the performance of a lifetime) tells his lover Chiquitita (Claudia Pineda), the widow of a man he killed, that he’ll never see her or her newborn daughter again before riding off to slaughter his employers, along with dozens of innocent onlookers, at a child’s birthday party. “I’m not a good person,” he tells her succinctly, returning her child to her arms. “Forget about me.” No, there is no future for any of ZeroZeroZero’s broken and brutal characters, no hope of continuity beyond the sinuous circular movement of the great serpent Commerce, which devours itself and is devoured across the generations. A boy becomes a messenger becomes a gangster becomes a soldier becomes a hole in the ground with no name and no mourners.

Series directors Stefano Sollima, Janus Metz, and Pablo Trapero set all this devastation against the backdrop of perhaps the most beautiful collection of images of the current decade. Cargo ports bustling with human and mechanical activity, the favelas and steep, crumbling streets of Monterrey, Mexico, the desolate castles and ruined farms of Calabria — everything is framed and photographed with exquisite attention to detail. The most rote and perfunctory connective narrative tissue is given no less consideration than the show’s breathless action scenes or its intimate and sinuous sex scenes. A woman gets out of a car and rather than visual filler we’re looking at the awning of a warehouse cutting through light rain, at waves breaking against the jetty in the extreme background, at cracks in the parking lot and elongated shadows stretched and fraying by the light peeking through the scudding clouds. Everything is crucial. Everything matters. The world pulls in tight around us, and the bottom falls out from beneath our feet, and to take the seat of power you must cut away everything good and vital in your life and smile and cross your legs as you sit between the two dead men who held it before you, grinning at the dark.