Director Lucrecia Martel creates an otherworldly landscape.
Some films have images that work their magic more powerfully than the story itself. That was my experience with Zama.
Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s latest feature has received nearly universal acclaim. Zama reached number four on Sight and Sound’s critics poll for best films of 2017, behind only Get Out, Twin Peaks: The Return and Call Me By Your Name. Adapted from Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name, Zama reworks some familiar critiques of colonialism into a genuinely compelling aesthetic experience.
As with many recent international films, Zama will screen only once in Madison, at the UW-Cinematheque on March 23 at 7 p.m.
Daniel Giménez Cacho stars as Don Diego de Zama, an 18th-century corregidor (local administrator) for a remote Spanish colony in what is now Paraguay. He longs for a transfer to a better post, and ultimately to reunite with his wife and child, who remain back in Spain. He’s caught in a bureaucracy worthy of Kafka, but remains both detached from his present and hopeful for his future.
The episodic plot of Zama, loosely organized around Don Diego’s desired transfer, integrates two additional threads: Don Diego’s sexual frustration and the search for a mysterious outlaw named Vicuña Porto. The narration is often elliptical. We and Don Diego often struggle to understand what people are talking about. Scenes start with minimal context, and they end abruptly. All this requires a little more attention and engagement to piece together the story.
Paralleling those narrative strategies are unique staging techniques, which can be more compelling than the drama. Martel experiments with how characters are framed within the shot and move within the scene.
In a brief shot where an innkeeper’s daughters pick up scattered coins after an attempted robbery, the young women seem to float through the room as they complete their task. The near-musical sound of the coins punctuate their dance-like movements. The important story information comes from the innkeeper, who stands with his back to the camera. But this mesmerizing movement absorbs our attention. Martel punctuates several scenes in this manner, with stylized movement, framing and color.
These distinct stylistic choices in ordinary scenes pay off later, as Martel pushes those techniques in two important sequences: Don Diego’s fever-driven illness, and a confrontation during a hunt for Vicuña Porto. Avoiding spoilers, the confrontation is narratively and stylistically surprising and spellbinding — and even a little audacious.
Thanks to Cacho’s performance, Don Diego often surprises us as he confronts his personal and professional dilemmas. Subtle changes in his weathered, angular features transform Don Diego from authoritative to befuddled, and from aroused to humiliated.
Martel and Cacho help us to retain our sympathy for Don Diego, despite his actions and the institution he represents. But we also empathize with his nonplussed disposition as he wanders through the other-worldly landscape Martel has conjured.
