I finally got around to watching The Zero Years. Wow. It's not as stylish or immediately overwhelming as Singapore Sling, but it's at least as odd, Michele Valley reappears, and it contains many of the same elements: a few characters in a constrained environment, violent women, men in bondage, blood, vomit . . and all rather well acted with an underlying tone of seriousness.
Three women have been sterilized, imprisoned and forced to work as dominatrixes in an S&M brothel run by a sinister bureaucratic (possibly governmental) organization. They are joined by a fourth, with only a few months to serve. Everyone is going slowly mad, and is kept drugged to the eyeballs, so it's not entirely clear if some of the stranger events are really happening. Despite all of this, it's mostly a character study, with the sensational elements taking second place to the interplay between the women.
Technically, the film looks pretty good, and the subtitles are reasonable, though the translator seems to be struggling a little at times. From the notes at the website, Nikolaidis seems to have been quite insistent that this wasn't to be taken as a piece of post-apocalytic SF: "It would be a mistake to interpret this as a futuristic story. No matter how harsh it may appear this movie is about the shape of things that are already here and established . ."
As I say, not as immediately culty as Singapore Sling, but clearly the work of a filmmaker like no other. I definitely want to know more about the director and see more of his films.
