Zama
★★★
M, 115 minutes, limited release
Zama: Languid, cryptic.
You have to find your own way through Zama, slowed down by the tropical torpor that hangs over the whole film. The pace is languid, the style is cryptic and the mood is downbeat, to say the least.
Written and directed by Argentina's Lucrecia Martel, a festival circuit favourite, it's an adaptation of a Latin American classic by Argentinian novelist Antonio di Benedetto, who was imprisoned and tortured during his country's Dirty War in the 1970s.
Regarding himself as apolitical, he never did discover the nature of the charge against him. Possibly, it lay only in the fact that he was a writer.
His great influence was Dostoevsky and, despite the fact that Zama, with its beaches and palm trees, is lit by bright sunshine, its embattled hero, Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) is dogged by a dark depression that Dostoevsky would have understood very well.
The story is set in the last decade of the 18th century and Zama is an officer of the Spanish Crown who has been stranded in a provincial South American backwater for so long that all he can think of is escape.
In the opening scene, he's standing on the beach, gazing mournfully at the horizon, and he keeps coming back to this spot as the action goes on and his prospects steadily worsen.
Nearby are a group of indigenous Guarani women who chase him away when they catch him watching them take a mudbath. It's a reliable clue to the fact he's not exactly the most feared colonial official in town.
The film's most diverting aspect is its subtle mockery of the colonists as they struggle to maintain some semblance of gracious living while the indigenes, the weather and their surroundings conspire against them.
The governor's wife insists on appearing in powdered wig and tightly laced bodice, as if in a Madrid drawing room, even though the wig itches and the bodice chafes. Llamas and other livestock wander blithely across the frame as administrative matters are being discussed, and the Guarani women look on dispassionately at the bumbling and the corruption.
There are intimations of the regime's brutality. Around his neck, the new governor wears a shrivelled trophy – a pair of ears which, we're told, belonged to a notorious bandit recently executed.
Then, later, we learn that the bandit is not dead after all. So little happens here that rumours become fact and facts go unexplained because nobody seems to care enough to ask the right questions.
The film had its premiere at Venice, where it was reviewed in admiring but baffled tones, and for all its beauty and its intriguing oddness, I can see why. The action seems so remote and the characters so underdrawn you can't get a grip on it.
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