ZAMA

“A LAS VICTIMAS DE LA ESPERA /TO THE VICTIMS OF EXPECTATION”

-Dedication page, Di Benedetto

This movie is cruel and it's excellent. It's devastating and feverish and sweaty. Seems silly to try and box it up with a useless name like this but "acid historical drama" much like Aguirre: Wrath of God might be a helpful point of entry. Gimme a jewel toned palette complimented with the most shocking introduction to the color orange!! accompanied by Brazilian guitar and I'm sold. THEN spritz it with acute loneliness, sexual repression, dizzying madness, and bureaucratic inertia and sister, we've got ourselves a PICTURE.

I watched the film, then got the novel at work (the only copy in our district, on our very shelves!) then watched it again the next week. Martel likes keeping her camera STILL and STONY but she'll stage a scene so there's always movement, that's usually framed in the background. Makes sense to be steady, making perfect use of tableau vivant in a story of slow moving delay.

Antonio di Benedetto loved Dostoyevsky! Funny how they were both sentenced to execution by firing squad! 'cept only one made it outta that horror, but only to be exiled to Spain without any explanation of the conviction or charges. Aint that somethin'. 

Time passes for Don Diego de Zama (played by the beaut Daniel Giménez Cacho who I think I only know from Get The Gringo (2012) 5/5) at a glacial pace while his entreaties to the governor for a transfer are endlessly delayed. Once a powerful “corregidor” and now simply second in command to a Spanish “gobernador” which as a Creole, he can aspire no higher. Awaiting his transfer request to be accepted, Zama’s career stagnates and his sanity putrefies.

Markers of time come from Zama's long and slow mental and physical deterioration as he's not only mocked and disregarded, ridiculed and betrayed but devoured by the fauna and flora, the pestilence and plague of Argentina. His transformation reminds me so much of young Fliora in Klimov's Come and See (1985), which I just watched this week 😱, who tragically ages and decays right before our very eyes. And both are such aural films with their humming and falling pitches that violently pierce your ears. Come and See may be unmatched in intensity and violence, but it absolutely has more moments of tenderness than Zama. That movie has some glorious and shiny moments of affirmation, Zama has none. There's no respite for Zama even in the film's funniest moments, which there are plenty of. The humor is usually at his expense but for me, it's mostly in the way things enter frame. I'm thinking about Luciana's arm stroking a horse (which in the novel Zama describes Luciana's face as horse-like lol) in the stable but most notably the llama pictured above, that proves he's seen as nothing more than livestock. Haha, Sad!

The women (I didn't notice Luciana's face the first time I watched, but she's there!) bathing shout, "Voyeur! Voyeur!" in the intro of the film. 

Zama isn’t a voyeur!! He’s a listener. He’s careful to never leer, to never look so long to gaze. He breaks eye contact if ever making it at all and he hides behind doors. Oh he's a creep! but he's no voyeur. Don Diego is constantly framed in or beside a door or window standing stock-still, with action happening on the other side of the frame. Action that we see, that he can only hear.

Violence in the film is mostly explained. We hear tell of atrocities but rarely see them. Even at the savage and brutal demise of Mister Zama, the image cuts from the gore, echoes the sound and shows us the river. Here's a passage early in the novel that I really like that does a similar thing. A prisoner is making his confession, who we see in the film briefly but isn't given this HEARTBREAKING aside.

"One night I fell asleep, cigar in mouth. I woke up, afraid to wake up, as if I already knew. A bat had grown out of me. Disgusted, I groped in the darkness for my biggest knife and cut it off. It fell to the floor and by daylight it was a woman with dark skin and I was saying I loved her. They took me to jail."

This isn't some fearsome individual, but a broken man! This seems to be a pattern here. Here's brutality that isn't subtle, more suggested and somewhat intimate. Martel lovingly speaks of this scene in particular, but chose not to include it because there'd be no way to shoot it without showing a dead black woman, something she finds unproductive and unnecessarily cruel.

Zama floats through the film to the sounds of Los Indios Tabajaras (“Always In My Heart” is used in Wong Kar-wai’s Days of Being Wild. Different jungle, same sense of aimless alienation.) It's lovely and haunting and feels so out of place. I've only ever seen one other Argentine film that I can think of, Tigre (2017) which I saw just this year at the Atlanta Film Festival. All I can really say is that both love to glorify the life-bringing waters and the ruthless jungle and all the creatures that inhabit them in a hazy and disjointed fashion and really works for me. On the very river this story takes place is where our director Ms. Martel first read the novel. And it's where the film begins and ends.

A few things I really liked that I don't have much to say about but felt worth noting:

• Rita and her two sisters circling around their father and Zama and dropping down in twos then standing up again picking up silver pieces in perfect dreamy harmony!! Lynchy mmm
• Slaves are stationed in nearly every interior scene and are always afforded close-ups. 
• The Oriental's precocious? divine? son prophesying of Zama as he's carried up the hillside. Hilarious. 
• THE BOY IN THE BOX!
• The squawking animals (I don't know chickens? hens? goats??) that sound like they're being gutted while women de-scale fish is totally unhinged. 
• Hearing the man's internal debate whether or not he should touch the ears hanging from a necklace worn by the governor which supposedly belong to Argentina's Billy the Kid, the outlaw, the myth, Vicuña Porto was so very very funny

"But as to the origins you were talking about, being a woman I see as a great advantage because in a way you get trained for failure which in my profession — in cinema — is very important." !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This article is worth reading even if I find Mister Teodoro a little too sure of himself, but Lucrecia's got some great words:  https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-lucrecia-martel/

**Seen in Theatre 1 at NWFF