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| Daniel Giménez Cacho in Zama |
Luciana: Lola Dueñas
Vicuña Porto/Gaspar Toledo: Matheus Nachtergaele
Ventura Prieto: Juan Minujín
Fernández: Nahuel Cano
Malemba: Mariana Nunes
El Oriental: Carlos Defeo
Capitán Parrilla: Rafael Spregelburd
Director: Lucrecia Martel
Screenplay: Lucrecia Martel
Based on a novel by Antonio Di Benedetto
Cinematography: Rui Poças
Art direction: Renata Pinheiro
Film editing: Karen Harley, Miguel Schverdfinger
In her New York Times review of Lucrecia Martel's Zama, Manohla Dargis suggests that we should see the film, then read the novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, and then see the film again. That's a little more work than many of us are prepared to put into our movies, but it gets at one central fact about Zama: It's a brilliant movie, but appreciating it -- perhaps even comprehending it -- demands a viewer's attention. Just figuring out who Zama is takes a little effort: When we first see him he's striking a kind of heroic pose on the seashore, but his life is anything but heroic. Don Diego de Zama is a magistrate in a backwater of the 18th-century Spanish colonial empire, somewhere in Argentina. The place is a kind of hell-hole, the sort of colony where the settlers constantly badger the officials for help in getting native laborers, the ones they once had having either escaped or died from overwork. Zama wants to escape, too, to return to his wife and children, or at least to be transferred to a better place, but bureaucracy stymies him constantly. Eventually, he agrees to go on an expedition to capture a notorious bandit, but that doesn't end well. It's a scathing, often funny, eventually tragic portrayal of colonialism, and Martel is unwilling to let Zama's story take a predictable course. The land, the New World environment, is too much for the people trying to tame it. The randomness of existence in this outpost is captured by a beautifully absurd moment when Zama is trying to deal with a recalcitrant superior and a llama wanders into the frame, peering with a blankly benign gaze over Zama's shoulder, mocking his serious mien. Rui Poças's cinematography superbly captures both the beauty and cruelty of this inhuman landscape.
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