Nine long years have passed since Lucrecia Martel’s last feature, The Headless Woman (2008). In the meantime, the director developed a science-fiction project that never came to fruition, endured a production process that wasted two months, and oversaw an extensive editing process on Zama, adapted from Antonio di Benedetto’s novel of the same name, which the film closely resembles. Although the shoot was a drawn-out affair, this certainly does not show on screen. Because it is at times inward-looking, Zama is a daunting work from an artist who continually redefines her cinematic language with every film.

Zama follows its title character through three periods of his life, which can be summed up as courting an official’s wife, defending an assistant’s budding attempts at writing while on duty, and volunteering with a small military unit to capture a notorious bandit in the Paraguayan wilderness. Don Diego de Zama is a Corregidor, that is, a magistrate, serving the Spanish Crown in Asunción. The one thing he always wants, yet never manages to achieve, is to be taken out of this backwater and transferred to a comfortable post in Buenos Aires, Santiago, or anywhere else within the vast imperial borders of 1790s Spain. Over time, however, through his interactions with colleagues, nobles, townspeople and the Indigenous population, Martel reveals what kind of man he is and how inadequate he is.

Zama is Martel’s first literary adaptation. This is an interesting choice, since di Benedetto’s novel relies solely on first-person narration. Because cinema is good at capturing surfaces, this is exactly what Martel does: she turns the book’s inward-looking narration outward. She creates a psychogeography for the clumsy and hapless Zama to wander through. In this way Zama resembles The Headless Woman, in that both offer the viewer subtle, objective perspectives on their protagonists. In Zama, tight close-ups focus on Don Diego’s weary face and sunken eyes, while a stream of off-screen sound, babbling as if his own thoughts had been given voice, swirls around the character.

On Twitter, critic Steve Macfarlane aptly compared Zama to the cantankerous character Larry David plays in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In addition, as Alex Engquist noted in a reply to that post, much like in the HBO series, parts of the film’s upbeat, lively score serve as an ironic counterpoint to Zama’s escapades and the misfortunes that befall him as a result. That said, such a comparison is better suited to di Benedetto’s book. In the novel the reader is always inside Zama’s head. The character reveals himself to be extremely self-centered, conceited, pretentious, cowardly and hypocritical. Di Benedetto underscores the last of these traits through Zama’s terse utterances, which contradict the (usually interminable) thoughts that precede them. In Martel’s adaptation, Zama’s self-image is not so plainly evident. Daniel Giménez Cacho’s multifaceted, gradually building performance initially presents Zama as a man of principle.

In the film’s first image, he is on a shore, gazing out at a body of water. His weight rests on one leg. He is outfitted with a sword, a white hat and a red coat that lend him a regal air, and he endlessly longs to move, to get away, to leave. In the final part of the film, Zama fulfills this ambition by volunteering for a military unit seeking Vicuña Porto, whom he had once arrested while serving as corregidor. Nine years later, at this point the character looks like a ruined man. His clothes are in tatters and a bushy white beard hangs down from his chin. His eyes, which have alternately signaled disappointment and exhaustion, now reflect misery. He will never see his wife and children again.

Martel’s film focuses narrowly on Zama and, in this sense, fails to offer a new perspective on the history of colonialism. Nevertheless, the critique that di Benedetto and Martel make is felt indirectly in their portrayal of Zama’s absurd existence. Zama is a puppet stuck in colonialism and serving it, a fool and a Kafkaesque, incompetent bureaucrat.

Zama is part of a current trend toward slow, hallucinogenic art films set in the past. Albert Serra’s Story of My Death (2013) and Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014) disregard the stock conventions associated with period films, creating hypnotic works that bring together the fantastic and the banal. Zama sits in the middle of the spectrum between Story of My Death and Jauja. It carries not a trace of the swaggering filmmaking peculiar to the former, nor does it plunge into the dreamlike realm of the latter. Instead, as in Martel’s earlier work, Zama is governed by a concreteness accentuated by its elliptical editing. Dreamlike, startling elements, such as the monotonous drone in the soundtrack, the fleeting image of a child and a wandering llama, appear in flashes.

In keeping with Martel’s way of working, Zama does not take you by the hand and help you along in terms of plot either. What is more, it avoids explicit indications of the passage of time, a crucial structural component of the novel. The three sections of di Benedetto’s book take place in 1790, 1794 and 1799.

What Martel does here instead is blur the time that passes in the film, creating the impression that Zama is stuck not only in the same place but also in the same time. Perhaps Zama’s aesthetic structure is plain, in the sense that it is more straightforward than Martel’s earlier work. Still, in a year filled with relatively lifeless films at the New York Film Festival, it is a refreshing work. In this sense, Zama offers us the freedom that its character, who is nothing more than his title, desperately seeks in people, places and objects.

Tanner Tafelski

Translation (into Turkish): Nahit Evre Uçarcı

Source