Preview: The Historical Absurdism of ‘Zama,’ Courtesy of Public Cinema

 

Zama was one of the most widely celebrated films of last year’s festival circuit, but early reviews gave an intimidating impression: it was sold as a challenging, masterful film by a challenging, masterful filmmaker. I’d argue that the film’s quality hasn’t been exaggerated in the least bit, but it’s difficulty has certainly been overstated. Unlike the early, more elliptical work by its Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, Zama is deceptively straightforward, communicating its central conflict in the opening shot (seen above): Don Diego de Zama is a Spanish conquistador somewhere in Latin America, and he wants out. Zama gazes in frustration from the shore to the horizon, conspicuously out of place in his posh regalia. Throughout the film, he grows more sickly and unkempt, making less and less effort to keep his powdered wig on straight (if at all) as he slowly becomes a dusty specter of his former self. His arc is one of continual obstruction, as his escape is blocked at every turn.

The film has the air of a self-important historical drama, but on some obscure frequency, it operates like a comedy. Zama is not a particularly likable character and is obviously a high-status representative of an oppressive regime, so Martel views him with an understandable amount of ironic distance. Watching Zama get continually teased with false hope only to have the rug pulled out from under him again and again offers an absurd sense of catharsis.

Two characters seem to exist solely to frustrate Zama’s desires: one is a pants-less messenger slave dressed only in a flamboyant blue blazer, whose phrasing always seems to be delivering good news before ultimately dashing Zama’s hopes, much in the style of a Shakespearean clown (or Arrested Development’s “literal doctor”); the other is a high-class seductress who, on multiple occasions, offers Zama escape of the sexual sort only to make the last-minute suggestion that he come back some other time.

After a certain point, the sheer exaggeration of these roadblocks for a character with such entitlement takes on a level of surreal farce (which at one key point manifests itself as a distracting llama), which could be compared to the oft-unrecognized humor of Franz Kafka. The only logical explanation is that the universe is conspiring against him, as maybe it should.

The film is a change of form for Martel who, despite being canonized by The Criterion Collection in 2015, had been radio-silent for almost 10 years before making Zama. Her previous films, though packed with ideas about privilege, violence, and decay, have decidedly avoided having a clear narrative center or recognizable characters. In the case of the much more accessible Zama, the prolonged attention given to its central performance (played with great commitment by Daniel Giménez Cacho) gives Martel’s cerebral concerns a real sense of human weight–so the decomposing people and termite-infested spaces of its doomed colony feel that much more grotesque.

One thing that Zama has in common with Martel’s earlier films, however, is her manipulation of time. Cinema is, of course, a time-based art form (unlike painting, for example), but relatively few filmmakers take advantage of this to tightly control the way their audience experiences the passage of time, the mainstream assumption being that a good film is a fast-paced film. Far from being boring, Lucrecia Martel definitely falls into the “slow cinema” camp in the way she molds time in Zama very intentionally.

There are long, weary pauses in the film’s dialogue (filled aurally by the jungle wildlife’s natural ambience) that gives the film a sense of dense humidity, further emphasizing the colonists discomfort in a place they clearly don’t belong. Perhaps more importantly, though, the slowness is integral to Don Diego de Zama’s journey (or lack thereof), which is characterized first and foremost by impatience. Zama is stuck in Latin America for, in his own vague words, “a long time” and it is important for viewers to lose their own sense of time as well. The effect is especially potent in a theater, where you feel an obligation to be still and quiet for as long as the filmmaker wants to trap you.

Unlike Don Diego de Zama, however, you won’t mind being trapped by Martel. The theater screen does wonders for her bold compositions, especially when it comes to color: Zama utilizes dazzling dynamic range in capturing the juxtaposition between European austerity and Latin America’s organic vibrancy, shifting between dingy beige to ghostly black-and-white to vivid lime-greens and blood-reds, depending on the occasion. Along with the film’s low-key absurdist humor, Zama’s high-contrast visual aesthetic breathes life into what might otherwise feel like homework.

The opportunity to see Zama in a theater is a rare treasure. Great American films that go on to receive festival awards and critical praise usually find their way to major cities eventually—Moonlight is a good example of this—but as far as international darlings (from, say, Argentina) go, it’s much more common for these movies to never become so much as a blip on your radar. Thankfully, Knoxvillians have The Public Cinema, who are committed to presenting free screenings of movies like Zama, which is not to be missed.

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