05/09/2017

Lucrecia Martel emerges from the wilderness with a strange, sensual wonder










Lucrecia Martel is the elusive poet of Latin-American cinema, missing believed lost, the Mary Celeste in human form. She made La Cienaga and The Holy Girl; split the Cannes audience in two with her brilliant, maddening The Headless Woman. And then, all at once, Martel seemed to vanish. There were rumours that she had been unwell, or that she spent years kick-starting a stalled science-fiction picture, or that she’d embarked on a long boat trip right up the Amazon. I think I like the third option the best. It makes her sound like Mr Kurtz.




The making of the film came out of a personal journey for Ms. Martel herself. The abandoned work on the science-fiction film was also for an adaptation, “El Eternauta,” a cult comic in Argentina. Ms. Martel was no stranger to career challenges; she largely taught herself filmmaking in the 1990s when the country’s economic crisis hobbled the state film school she had entered. But the aborted project was a confusing blow. Seeking a way out of her dismay, she decided to take a trip on the Paraná River. “I had a wooden boat, completely unsuitable for that adventure,” Ms. Martel said, recalling temperatures of over 40 degrees Celsius and “all kinds of insects, tremendous summer storms, my meager experience as a captain in a fierce river.”
She took along a few books and “many photocopies of 18th-century expeditions on rivers in South America.” One of the books she packed was Di Benedetto’s novel. “There I read ‘Zama,’” Ms. Martel said, summing up her reaction in a single word: “euphoria.”


Now Martel is back, after a nine-year absence, with the astonishing Zama, adapted from a novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, about an 18th-century Spanish colony perched on the Asuncion coast. Her film is haunted, haunting and admittedly prone to the occasional longueur insofar as it runs to its own peculiar rhythm; maybe even its own primal logic. It arrives in Venice as if blown in from another world.   Audaciously, Martel refuses to provide date or a location, let alone any handy background information. She’d rather set us down at the water’s edge and leave us to find our own way from there, mixed in amid the other colonialists and settlers who cling to this desolate lip of the land, sweating buckets beneath their periwigs.
Soon enough we encounter Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho). He serves as the crown’s magistrate, a Spanish functionary, but his pleas for a transfer are being constantly rebuffed. He’s pining for home, for cold weather; lying in the grass to ogle women bathing and dreaming of “Russian princesses wrapped up in their furs”. Beyond the settlement there is the jungle, the wilds. This is reputed to contain masked warriors, painted ghouls and a terrifying brigand named Vicuna, who may already be dead, assuming he ever existed at all. But these, perhaps, are mere distractions. Basically Zama is a film about a man who waits, unhappily, for his own release.




The film’s uncompromising aesthetic and deliberate pace may prove too steep a hurdle for many a viewer, even for those who wowed by the director’s previous films. While films like “The Headless Woman” and “The Holy Girl” also tied themselves to the lead’s subjective experience, both took place in the here-and-now, benefitting from a readily understandable context wholly apart from the alien colonial world of “Zama.” By eschewing any real exposition or situational cues, Martel forces viewers to either go all in all at once, or to never meaningfully connect.
Viewers that are willing to meet the film at its very particular wavelength will find themselves lulled into a state of confused delirium. As Zama meanders through his outskirts post, he finds himself in a number of recurring situations. There are the frequent visits with Luciana (Lola Dueñas), a colonial matron who constantly rebuffs his advances, or his repeated visits with local governor, played by three different actors so to indicate the cruel advance of time while our lead remains maddeningly inert. Often in lieu of linear dialogue the script will repeat the same lines again and again, using them as kind of incantation to bring on that state of feverishness.
As the film goes on, that delirium will infect the very dialogue itself. Characters will deliver lines out of conversational order, as if an actor tasked with reading three sentences delivered them in any he or she chose. Sometimes the fever attacks grammar itself, like at one point, where Zama looks to native girl who may or may not be his former mistress and notes, “that boy, she’s holding my son.”



It’s once Zama finally takes his fate into his own hands — leaving the colony to join a band of soldiers in pursuit of a notorious scoundrel who may or may not exist — that the film dares to breathe, even if the breaths seem likely at any minute to turn to final gasps. At this point, merely escaping stasis for an equally futile but moving target is the best Zama can hope for, and Martel takes redemptive beauty where she can find it. The camera steps back to take in open-skied vistas, restful island melodies creep into the soundscape, and the overriding palette switches from rich, overripe shades of chartreuse and mustard to cleaner, kinder primaries — one of them blood-red, of course, but the anxious, possibly alluring promise of death is the most unwavering fixture of this defiantly difficult, finally exhilarating vision.







J.M. Coetzee on the book :  A Great Writer We should Know



Zama is a prickly character. He holds a degree in letters and does not like it when the locals are not properly respectful. He suspects that people mock him behind his back, that plots are being cooked up to humiliate him. His relations with women—which occupy most of the novel—are characterized by crudity on the one hand and timidity on the other. He is vain, maladroit, narcissistic, and morbidly suspicious; he is prone to accesses of lust and fits of violence, and endowed with an endless capacity for self-deception.
He is also the author of himself, in a double sense. First, everything we hear about him comes from his own mouth, including such derogatory epithets as “swaggering” and “dogslayer,” which suggest a certain ironic self-awareness. Second, his day-to-day actions are dictated by the promptings of his unconscious, or at least his inner self, over which he makes no effort to assert conscious control. His narcissistic pleasure in himself includes the pleasure of never knowing what he will get up to next, and thus of being free to invent himself as he goes along.
On the other hand—as he intermittently recognizes—his indifference to his deeper motives may be generating his many failures: “Something greater, I knew not what, a kind of potent negation, invisible to the eye,…superior to any strength I might muster or rebellion I might wage,” may be dictating his destiny. It is his self-cultivated lack of inhibition that leads him to launch an unprovoked knife attack on the only colleague who is well disposed toward him, then to sit back while the young man takes the blame and loses his job.

 The New York Review of Books

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