Lucrecia Martel (2017)
The day before I saw Zama, I read Simone, a short story by Elizabeth Taylor. The main character is Ethel, a bedridden woman whose daily help gets her books from the public library. Although Ethel’s not a likeable character (ailurophobic, for one thing), I felt a sneaking sympathy with her limited reading tastes: she can’t ‘abide stories of foreign countries, or anything historical … or violence, or adventure’. No one could accuse Zama of the last but Lucrecia Martel’s first film since The Headless Woman (2008) is set in a remote (unnamed?) South American colony of the Spanish Empire during the eighteenth century and isn’t short of mayhem. It’s been very positively received by critics but I feared I wouldn’t engage with it, thanks to Ethel-like prejudices, and I found it punitive for other reasons too. Zama has increased by 20% the number of entries beginning with ‘z’ on this blog. I’d be lying if I said I’d got more out of it than that.
Martel’s title character is a middle-aged imperial functionary, assigned to the colony for some years. He feels strongly that a move is long overdue. It’s quickly obvious – just about the only thing in the film meriting that adverb – that Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is not going to get a new posting. Martel’s adaptation of a 1956 novel of the same name by her fellow Argentine Antonio di Benedetto is the latest entry to the canon of films where a principal character’s predicament merges with that of the viewer stuck in the cinema. (Watching movies like this and another recent addition, the admittedly more light-hearted Final Portrait, really makes you appreciate the quality of a trapped-protagonist existential drama like Woman in the Dunes.) The last we see of Zama, he’s had part of his arms cut off but is still just about alive. The audience rise from their seats to check there’s still circulation in the lower limbs.
Zama‘s cultural setting and personnel bespeak themes of imperialism, racism and abuse, including sexual exploitation of the indigenous population. (Zama fathers a child born to a native woman.) For many, these themes in themselves are sufficient to compel admiration. I’ve now skimmed a few of the reviews underlying the more than 90% ‘fresh’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes. A fruitless wait and the characterisation of Don Diego as a gloomy but consistently ridiculous figure are sufficient to elevate the tale into absurdist (Beckettian) fable. The protagonist hallucinates so it’s also surreal (and Borgesian). The rules governing transfers keep changing and getting harder for Zama to satisfy – all that’s required to make the film a bureaucratic nightmare (ergo Kafkaesque). Early on, a native man of colour, after being held as a prisoner, runs head first into a wall before regaling Zama and other representatives of the occupying regime with the story of ‘a fish that spends its life swimming to and fro … fighting water that seeks to cast it upon dry land … because the water rejects it .. the water doesn’t want it’. The allegorical words translate easily into imperialist terms but what does Zama go on to say about the colonialist enterprise, beyond that it was a bad thing and doomed to eventual failure? The only surprise in the film is the accompanying music – Hawaiian-sounding, jaunty, anachronistic.
Martel and her cinematographer Rui Poças (who also shot The Ornithologist) create some remarkable images but I’ll remember watching Zama as much for the action in the back two rows of the Lumiere at Curzon Bloomsbury as for what was on the screen. Two seats to my left was an entitled young woman, who – inter alia – kept her phone on until the last possible moment before the film started. Halfway through it, there were sounds of snoring from the row behind us – fairly gentle but loud enough for my neighbour to turn and order the man concerned to shut/wake up. As I’d dozed off briefly at an earlier stage, this episode was doubly reassuring. It meant I wasn’t the only person to lose consciousness during Zama. It also seemed to mean, since the entitled one didn’t tell me off, that I slept quietly.
31 May 2018
