Zama

The radiant colors of fire sparks in the night, shocking pink native dyes and lush green moss, and oscillating cascades of sound including exotic guitar, electronic interludes and soothing lapping waves, these and other rich innovations bring extra zip to the already thrilling story of Don Diego de Zama. Zama, a Spanish administrator in 1700s South America, refuses to adjust to his surroundings and instead pines for the continent and habits he left long ago. As his expected transfer to Spain hangs in limbo, Zama's paranoia about the dangers of the local landscape and hostility towards those of different races, increases. He lives in a bubble of his own creation. Yet if the sulking and morose Zama will not visit the pulsing and vibrant new landscape around him, it will visit him.

Director Lucrecia Martel deftly makes the audience part of the story. The scenes she provides are rich and dazzling in a variety of ways; color, sound, wildlife, clothing, furnishings, evident historical research, insight into human nature, brilliant acting and more. Her portrayal is wonderfully balanced. Martel does not glorify the past, nor does she skewer it. Pristine and beautiful scenery of lakes, rivers and forests are offset by glimpses of the morgue with its cholera and plague victims, the cruel and routine punishments and torture implements of the time and whirling ceiling fans that remind you of what the tropics without air conditioning must feel like. Martel's sensitivity and depth of feeling is astounding. The film audience, for example, is not provided with subtitles of native languages. "We deserve to not understand what the natives are talking about," said Martel who was at this Toronto International Film Festival screening. "History taught around the world is mostly about the colonizers." In one scene there are three sisters who revolve around a central point in a room, and Martel wants it to seem like they are part of a miniature music box. Such wonderful little touches. The film is spiced with brilliant lines throughout. "Europe is best remembered by those who were never there," for instance, and "nighttime is safer for the blind." The film is based on a novel by Antonio Di Benedetto.

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.

The costumes, cinematography, etc do create a self-contained but claustrophobia-inducing world. The random sounds, strange glances, etc make one wonder if it is all just some inside joke in a pointless world. And, so much attention is on the insecure zama & the supercilious governor that there isn't even any real exploration of day-to-day life.

All in all, one of the strangest films ever.

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.

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.