Continuing to complete director Abel Ferrara’s filmography, I rented from iTunes his movie 4:44 Last Day On Earth (2011), one of his several collaborations with actor Willem Dafoe, after Go Go Tales and before Pasolini. Here, its a low budget version of the apocalypse set in one apartment with a couple – an actor (Dafoe) and a painter (Shanyn Leigh) – as we’re told environmental catastrophe (“Al Gore was right”) will end everything at 4:44am. While exploring the internal struggle with impending death and how one should conduct oneself morally, as the couple make love, dance and fight, the movie is quite prescient about human interaction in the Covid era; people use Skype and their laptops to connect with families and friends, and human connection is mediated through digital screens. The sound design communicates the noise of the world through the overlapping dialogue, TV and laptop sounds, all of which can be quite chaotic. The apocalypse becomes a grainy YouTube found footage spiral. This movie feels of a piece with Ferrara’s other spiritual movies like Mary and Siberia; there tends to be a similar form of great scenes intermingled with bad or pretentious moments because of his loose, artistic approach. Dafoe, as always, goes to the mat for his collaborator and friend, and keeps you invested while rolling with the overheated theatrics. The most compelling parts are him witnessing a random person’s suicide and later, his struggle with sobriety (a personal theme for the director). Unfortunately, Leigh (Ferrara’s girlfriend at the time) is not as strong a performer as Dafoe, which is hard for what is supposed to be a two hander drama. I wish Natasha Lyonne had a bigger part or the co-lead, appearing with Paul Hipp in a scene where Dafoe visits old friends from his drug days; she and Dafoe yelling at each other would have been better. Rented on iTunes. Recommended, mainly for Ferrara fans. So far, Go Go Tales is my favoutite of the Dafoe-Ferrara collaborations and in terms of Ferrara’s more spiritual (almost Buddhist), late-career turns, Siberia would be my recommendation as it’s so far out, man, a full-blown art movie epic.
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