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
