Zama

Zama (2018)

Dir. and written by Lucrecia Martel

Based on Zama by Antonio di Benedetto

Starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Lola Dueñas, Matheus Nachtergaele, Juan Minujín

ZAMA is a curious, quiet little period piece which is so subtle and unpushy that I didn't entirely realize it was a comedy until maybe halfway through, and didn't realize it was a horror movie for a while longer, though in retrospect it's very much both, albeit in the most dry, deadpan, and existential iterations of those two genres possible. It's the story --or, perhaps, the anti-story-- of Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, CRONOS and WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, beyond perfection in a role which requires him to paradoxically overwhelm the audience by underplaying everything), a minor Spanish official in colonial-era Paraguay, desperate to be transferred out of this rural backwater, but miserable enough to be unable to avoid self-sabotage before that can happen.

The primary tone, then, is one of crushing stagnation, the slow-motion horror of being gradually buried alive in a thousand tiny setbacks. For the longest time, the movie is basically the DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOIS set in 18th century Paraguay, with Zama's many pathetic attempts to escape his miserable purgatory perpetually offering a brief flicker of hope before leaving him even worse-off than he was before, his stockpile of hope emptied just a little further. The movie wavers close to out-and-out absurdism in the litany of indignities it lavishes on its milquetoast protagonist, piling up his woes so gradually that they barely register until they reach critical mass. Gradually, though, the comic insults begin to add up in wilder and wilder ways (he's forced to move into a haunted hotel at one point!) while the style of the film remains as blithely reserved as ever, resulting in a disconnect which is at once very funny and quite existentially disturbing. The sense of escalation is gradual, but as irresistible and flattening as a glacier, and by the film's end things begin to spiral out of control in increasingly blunt, visceral ways. Indeed, the final section (the film, reflecting the apparently excellent 1956 novel it adapts, is really three mostly self-contained chapters) suddenly plunges into a vivid, desperate jungle nightmare that I'm required by law and tradition to compare to AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, finally paying off the first two acts' gradually escalating sense of human-crushing chaos while losing none of the film's quiet potency.

All throughout, director Lucretia Martel (LA CIENAGA, THE HEADLESS WOMAN) maintains a disinterested reserve, as though the camera barely finds Zama interesting enough to bother following him, instead peering curiously around its protagonist into the world of colonialist horrors barely noticed by him, but which can hardly fail to disturb a modern viewer (most notably the ubiquitous enslaved native Paraguayans, who the story and characters completely ignore but the camera finds pointedly relevant). Zama, who can't even control his life, barely manages to stay at the center of his own story, with Martel's unfussy deep focus shots and vivid evocation of a bygone world (which is, perhaps, not so alien to our own as we would like to believe; note the thoroughly modern musical choices) filling in the ellipses of the go-nowhere narrative with a rich, endlessly fascinating tableau of life.

Martel has made only three other movies, all of which seem to be highly esteemed, but none of which I’ve ever seen. They’re definitely on the list now, though; I mean look at this lady. I like her style:

A little research suggests that she’s most known for her caustic, deadpan satire at the expense of her native Argentina’s bourgeois upper class, and you could certainly read something of that into ZAMA, if you were so inclined. There’s something very revealing about the film’s ostensible focus on Zama’s stagnating ennui in the face of the shocking brutality going on all around him. He’s a laughingstock, yes; but our chuckles at his expense catch in our throat when we see the horrors of the system this man is casually supporting. That he is completely and utterly ambivalent to that system pushes the discomfort even further; it would be appalling but comfortingly comprehensible if he were a fervent believer, but to see such a vacuous, indifferent man perpetrate such horrors with halfhearted disinterest is singularly chilling… and easy to relate to. Zama isn’t an actively cruel man; he’s too consumed by bored self-pity to take sadistic pleasure in having slaves whipped or natives executed. Instead he barely even notices. The savagery he’s taking part in doesn’t even register in the face of his all-consuming moping. And are we really so different? The period setting merely allows Martel to quietly push the audience to notice the cruelty of a system that daily life inures us to. If Zama were a modern-day bureaucrat disinterestedly crushing the poor and vulnerable with the faceless, impersonal power of the state, we probably wouldn’t even notice it. We’d take at face value that his wounded self-esteem really is what the movie finds interesting. Because he would look like us. 

 Anyway, my real point here is that the movie contains some of the best damn llama acting I've ever seen in my life. I mean, this fucking lama has enough charisma to make The Rock look like Ryan O’Neal.* Poor Daniel Giménez Cacho gives the best performance of his career, and still gets upstaged by an errant llama (you'll know it when you see it). Perfectly fitting, I guess, for this particular vision.

*Here you go. 

THE BEST OF 2018, AS SEEN FROM 2019: THE SERIES

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