At the start of Lucrecia MartelsZama—the finest film of 2018 so far—Don Diego de Zama, a functionary of the Spanish empire, stares out from an unnamed shore at an indefinite horizon. The view from this perch is nice, but its old news; standing ashore with his eyes trained anywhere but on his dire present circumstances has more or less become the mans day job.
Lately, though, the view from the shore has itself become a tough pill to swallow. Zama, played with maddening self-possession by the Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, is a magistrate posted in the unglamorous backwaters of 18th-century Paraguay, where hes more or less destined to rot, thanks to a new rule preventing New World-born Creole americanos like himself (as opposed to men born in Spain) from rising any higher in the ranks than he already has. Its possible hes in denial about that fact. Repeatedly deflated by the local governors insincere efforts to get him transferred back to civilization, Zama nevertheless has such a high-minded sense of his own status that what everyone else understands as a bad case of inescapable, Sartrean limbo appears, to Zama, to be a mere matter of red tape. He knows but doesnt know that its more or less too late, that his maneuvering will get him nowhere. When an indigenous man spins him a tale about a fish out of water, doomed to remain stranded on its banks, Zama listens with his usual detached curiosity, maybe internalizing it, maybe not. Clearly, though, hes the fish. By the end of Zama, he most certainly realizes as much. But it costs him an era of his life—to say nothing of limb.
Zama, adapted by Martel from the 1956 novel by under-read Argentinian master Antonio Di Benedetto, is predicated on the idea that if Zama were entirely free of delusion, thered be nothing to see here. His inflated but withering sense of status, manifest in hopeless-romantic trifles and misguided power plays, is not only the story—its half the fun. The other half is, of course, in the constant sense of comeuppance, which in Martels movie serves as the backbone of the plot. Here, time is marked through Zamas boomeranging failures.
Other things also occupy him. Zama spies on a group of nude indigenous women and gets chased away with cries of “Voyeur!” He pays infrequent visits to a woman he impregnated and the son they made, occasionally trying to play father with questions like, “Can he speak?” He just as infrequently reminisces about the wife and kids hes got back home and expresses a vague desire to get back to them. Meanwhile, he nurtures his lust for the daughter of the local treasurer, Luciana Piñares de Luenga (a fabulously coquettish Lola Dueñas), who strings Zama along with competing promises of kisses and assertions that men are too lusty, and shes not that kind of girl.
But all of this is secondary incident. By and large, Zama wanders and rots, suffering his stagnation in isolation; the rest, though overwhelming, is flotsam flowing in and out of view.
Though its a period drama on its surface, rife with big wigs and fanciful costuming, Zama is by no means a conventional historical retelling, lurching from event to event with a clear sense of time and place. It is instead, like Zama himself, a movie in limbo, moving sideways instead of forward, dancing in circles and reiterating itself. Time passes, but how much? When, late in the film, someone asks Zama how long hes been at this outpost, all he has to say for himself is, “a long time.” It is the essence of this enigmatic, discomfitingly strange film that history writ large feels far off and underdetermined, as distant as the empire, as if all that were left of it were the scattershot clumps occasionally washing ashore. The movie is just this side of surreal.
For us in the audience, that approach inevitably takes some getting used to. But its pretty on brand for Martel, who has, over the course of four feature films, indisputably become not just one of Argentinas greatest filmmaking voices, but one of the greatest directors working anywhere. She burst onto the scene in 2001 with La Cienaga, a spectacularly muted, dark study of two bourgeois Argentine families in decline, rife with a creepy abundance of scars and bad decisions. Nine years passed between her last feature, The Headless Woman (about a privileged Argentine driven mad by her potential involvement in a hit-and-run) and last years festival debut of Zama. In that time she was subject to failures of her own, not unlike her latest hero: Martel was for some time caught up in a science-fiction project, an adaptation of Héctor Germán Oesterhelds comic El Eternauta (“The Eternal”), which fell through.
Depressed after that venture, the story goes, Martel took a boat trip on the Paraná River with friends; it was on this trip that she read Di Benedettos novel. Zama was filmed in nine weeks in Argentina, with a budget of $3.5 million—her largest to date—and a team of producers that numbered nearly 30 strong, including actor Danny Glover and El Deseo, the company run by Pedro Almodóvar and his brother, Agustín. It was an uphill battle that got worse: after finishing the first cut of Zama, Martel was stricken with cancer. (She has declined to specify what kind.) She is thankfully in remission.
Itd be cheesy to attribute Zamas artistic successes to any of that backstory. On the other hand, the movie is clearly the product of wide-ranging experience and intelligence, including that of Di Benedetto, a provincial writer who, unlike some of his peers—the likes of Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges—did not become internationally known during the Latin American literary boom of the 60s and 70s. Instead, his career was cut short by 18 months of imprisonment and torture during Argentinas “dirty war.” All of that happened after he published Zama in 1956—but as a critic for The Nationhas smartly argued, Di Benedetto seemed “to have transmuted all his life experiences into the book," including those he hadnt had yet.
Martel has fashioned Zama into an equally fearless, piercing piece of work. The movie plays out like a dreamlike stream of indelicate curiosities. Slavery is a decadent hyperpresence, visible in almost every frame, particularly in the faces of the slaves themselves—most of whom are relatively mute, floating through the film and living among the colonizers as if belonging to everyone but no one in particular. Llamas and dogs wander in and out of the movie like lost extras. Scenes are suddenly overtaken by violence, but rarely overtly. We hear a shot, then pan slowly to a sick horse; a Native man runs headfirst into a wall after an interrogation, ducking below the frame.
Martels sensibility is as oblique as it is sensitive, confounding as it is grimly humorous. Its a movie that seems constantly to be spilling the secrets of this world, but without fanfare—theres an unsettling banality to it all. Wigs keep needing re-adjustment on the heads of the Europeans. Surely theres a metaphor in there somewhere about the everyday follies of power. The Europeans sense of grandeur is decrepit; their environs lend themselves to a movie thats dirty and tactile, loose and lived-in, rather than grand.
Throughout Zamas run time, just short of two hours, Martel has us view the action from beyond the borders of doors or windows, or from the next room, because that is Zamas station: outside looking in. And boy, doesnt he know it. The movies key triumph is that it still manages, despite the desperation of its subject and the eventual grossness of its stunning last act, to have a sense of humor about all of this, albeit one thats bone-dry.
Cachos performance as Zama, certain to be one of the years finest, is what seals the deal, in that regard. Its a role premised on quiet panic—a character slowly but unavoidably coming to terms with being belittled by his own power. Martel, a consummate critic of that power, would of course be the first to laugh at that. She keeps Cacho front and center, in shallow focus, with his agile gaze exaggerated and his red-hot internal drama roiling beneath his deceptively aloof exterior. Its a tour de force, and Zama is the rare movie good enough to deserve it.
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