Zama

Absorbing and deeply unsettling, I enjoyed this movie but found it difficult to follow. Having not read the novel and being unfamiliar with Spanish colonial history, there was probably quite a bit I missed due to lack of education on the subject. However, I came out of the theater feeling as though I was covered in a deep tropical sweat. Like The Witch (2015), it immediately places the viewer in the film. Zama is accurate in its slow pace as a period drama on a tropical island during a time when letters from Spain took FULL YEARS to reach the colonies, and these days standard viewers may have trouble maintaining focus on the travails of one man's experience for almost 2 hours. Bursts of action actually woke older people up in the audience of the theater where I viewed it. Zama was marketed to U.S. audiences with a quickly-edited, intense trailer that had me itching to see it, while the film itself seems to have left more people scratching their heads. I'm looking forward to a second viewing, though preferably not on another humid, ninety-degree day.

I read several good reviews about Zama, including some friends recommended me as an excellent movie, however, I only found imperfections, a boring movie for almost two hours and nothings happens, unlikely what looks like a great production it ends on an amount of resources without taking advantage. Too many mistakes, particularly with the spelling, why the natives do not have any accent? or even "the colonial" does not speak proper, poor conversations, bad timing, many mistakes from art department, fake and poor costume design, the director does not take advantage of the beautiful environment, even the sound is bad... just a few fake birds, in the beginning, the acting of Lola Dueñas was good, the rest of the cast does not shine at all, especially Juan Minujin so sad acting, when he speaks you cant understand what is he saying!

For a long time did not saw people leaving the cinema complaining... Such a shame Lucrecia Martel used a masterpiece novel from Antonio Di Benedetto, and made this meaningless and snob movie.

Poor Don Diego de Gama. Both parents Spanish, but he's never been to Spain, as he is frequently snobbily reminded by the Spanish-born residents in his 1790s Argentina back country town. He's a bureacrat serving a king 6000 miles away, unable to decide anything by himself, a fish in water (in a ruling metaphor) who can't live in a wet place. He wants to leave but can't, because everything is on hold. Will a military expedition bail him out? Bitterly totally ironic, structured around off camera sounds that are never what hearers think they are. I'm now hunting down the 1956 novel by Antonio_di_Benedetto.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, this film takes its time - lending emphasis to the slowness of the bureaucracy that traps Zama in his situation, and the boredom and frustration he suffers.

Is he complicit in his fate through not playing the game as expected, or are his ambitions simply fantasy in the first place? I'm not sure - but I got a similar feel here as I did from "Waiting for the Barbarians" - although that was more brutal and Mark Rylance the better man. In both cases, though, I was drawn in and really wanted to find out where it was headed as a story.

A film to immerse oneself in.

Daniel Giménez Cacho is the eponymous corregidor who has long since served his King in a Spanish colony in South America, hoping that he will soon earn a promotion and be able to leave this fairly squalid existence. He has a wife and child and to get back to them he is prepared to do pretty much anything, but gradually the man realises that he is but a pawn in a game being played by his superiors - who don't really want to be there either - that plays well to the narcissism and absolutism of a provincial administration that endowed the governor with kinglike powers to be used in petty and vengeful ways. Though "Zama" is more decent than many, there is is still a stark superiority complex amongst the conquerors whose treatment of the non-Christian and highly superstitious native population borders on the barbaric. There's a good Scots expression about being "king of your own midden" and Cacho et al deliver that sense well, especially when clad in their ill-fitting wigs and heavy European garments that further emphasise that they just don't belong here. Will he get his promotion? In many ways the production reminded me of Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo" (!982) as it really does encapsulate onto film the hostility of the terrain and the environment in which "Zama" lives. It also depicts the natives as little better than savages whilst the narrative itself reveals that they are nowhere near as subjected as their European masters might like to think. Morally and physically it's an uncomfortable film to watch, but that's not a bad thing. It makes us think a little about the building blocks of empire and though it does plod along at times, is quite an interesting depiction of a man who is just as trapped as any he supervises.