Zama | Little White Lies

Zama

23 May 2018 / Released: 25 May 2018

Lush tropical landscape with towering palm trees, verdant grassy fields, and a group of people riding horses.
Lush tropical landscape with towering palm trees, verdant grassy fields, and a group of people riding horses.
5

Anticipation.

Through the god damn roof. 2008’s The Headless Woman is a masterpiece.

5

Enjoyment.

Bewitching. With every edit comes a surprise. Need to see it again, and fast.

5

In Retrospect.

Hard to suppress the hyperbole with this one. Truly an awesome achievement.

Lucre­cia Martel’s tale of colo­nial mis­ad­ven­ture in South Amer­i­ca is one of the great cin­e­mat­ic achieve­ments of the decade.

In 2016 the Amer­i­can pub­lish­ing imprint New York Review Books released a time­ly trans­la­tion of a 1956 Argen­tine nov­el named Zama’ by the author Anto­nio di Benedet­to. Time­ly in that it help­ful­ly pre­ced­ed the release of a much tout­ed film adap­ta­tion by the stag­ger­ing­ly tal­ent­ed direc­tor Lucre­cia Martel.

Read­ing the book in antic­i­pa­tion of the film, two thoughts occurred: one, that this abra­sive study of a dis­con­so­late, cock-blocked polit­i­cal func­tionary trapped in the crum­bling South Amer­i­can out­post of Asunción, Paraguay dur­ing the late 18th cen­tu­ry, is sure­ly, in the West, to be con­sid­ered a lost lit­er­ary clas­sic; and two, that trans­form­ing it into a film is an impos­si­ble endeav­our, as the text is large­ly formed of cir­cuitous, self-abas­ing inner mono­logue. In short, it’s some real­ly gnarly shit.

But we all know that the cin­e­mat­ic mas­ter­works which endure over time are those forged from tougher mate­r­i­al, and so it is with Martel’s aston­ish­ing, intu­itive and des­per­ate­ly sad new com­e­dy. Her adap­ta­tion – light­ly abridged but the­mat­i­cal­ly per­haps more expan­sive – main­tains Zama’s piti­ful sex­u­al need­i­ness, but empha­sis­es his sto­ry as a cau­tion­ary tale of colo­nial misadventure.

Our hap­less hero’s futile sta­tion is teased in the film’s open­ing shot as Zama, smart­ly turned out in offi­cial mil­i­tary threads and tri­corn hat, strikes a mighty pose on a shore­line and glances out to sea. His desire for escape and auton­o­my is pal­pa­ble, but so is the sense that he is, like Antoine Doinel at the end of The 400 Blows, stand­ing at the edge of the world with nowhere to go but backwards.

In the lead role is Daniel Giménez Cacho, whose tamped-down and soft­ly expres­sive per­for­mance per­fect­ly trans­mits Zama’s bare­ly con­cealed aston­ish­ment at his end­less run of bad luck. Every ele­ment of the film con­spires to mock his low­ly stature, from where he’s placed in the frame (often locked to one of its edges) to the sym­pho­ny of chirps and tweets which emanate from the back­drop and ally his actions to those of local fauna.

A person in a red coat and hat stands on a sandy beach, overlooking the sea and cliffs.

There is a sequence in which he is in the mid­dle of an alter­ca­tion with a co-func­tionary. As he talks, a lla­ma wan­ders into the room, stops next to him, looks around, and then wan­ders out again. Cacho man­ages not to inch, play­ing the moment as just anoth­er sur­re­al inter­lude in this law­less out­land where man and beast are large­ly inter­change­able. One beast who is the sub­ject of much con­tem­pla­tion, how­ev­er, is the elu­sive bogey­man known as Vicuña Por­to, a fig­ure whose mur­der­ous antics are caus­ing vital block­ages on the trade routes between near­by town­ships. Attempts to track and kill the elu­sive Por­to appear to be the cause of the admin­is­tra­tive disarray.

The loose-leaf plot­ting sees Zama attempt to secure a writ­ten per­mis­sion to return home to his wife and chil­dren, there­by ful­fill­ing the mas­cu­line ide­al of fam­i­ly man and pro­tec­tor. Duty aside, his all-per­va­sive sex­u­al long­ing leads him to spy on a cir­cle of bathing beau­ties and also attempt to seduce the cig­ar-smok­ing, acid-tongued treasurer’s daugh­ter, Luciana Piñares de Luen­ga, played as a bois­ter­ous man-eater by the always won­der­ful Span­ish actor Lola Dueñas.

His laugh­able attempts at play­ing away are ham­pered by his earnest charm, and Cacho, through his per­for­mance, man­ages to beau­ti­ful­ly stress Zama’s lim­its as both a bureau­crat and an amorous dandy. This deplorable gure even­tu­al­ly catch­es sight of his own defi­cien­cies as a human, and retreats towards the warm embrace of cer­tain death in the film’s quixot­ic clos­ing chapter.

In the spirt of its chaot­ic set­ting, the sto­ry is unfurled as a calyp­so-sound­tracked stream-of-con­scious­ness, a rus­tic dream state which reflects the notion that Zama him­self is react­ing to the moment rather than exe­cut­ing some care­ful­ly devised polit­i­cal mas­ter­plan. In the end, the film is about a man who sells his soul by the incre­ment as he even­tu­al­ly realis­es he’s alone in the world. It also sug­gests that those car­ry­ing out the impe­ri­al­ist dic­tates of a home nation are nat­u­ral­ly drawn to exploita­tion, as if it’s the only way to exert polit­i­cal pow­er. He hates hav­ing to ask oth­er peo­ple to help him lest it under­mine his mid­dling title. He also likes to milk his sta­tus for all its worth, espe­cial­ly when it comes to help­ing” his female maids or the indige­nous locals who clear­ly despise his presence.

Even though the film is set cen­turies ago, there’s some­thing futur­is­tic, maybe even post-apoc­a­lyp­tic, about the fraz­zled, com­i­cal­ly unfair world that Mar­tel man­u­fac­tures. Zama is an unex­cep­tion­al man, a drone in many respects. Yet Mar­tel is supreme­ly empa­thet­ic in her depic­tion of this per­son who is tempt­ed by self­ish impulse but reject­ed by the world around him. Maybe because, until the very end, he is seduced by the notion of hope and the touch­ing belief that he will be saved by his cohorts before it’s too late. Only in beat­ing his addic­tion to hope does he even­tu­al­ly find the tran­scen­dence and escape that he craves.

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