Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)

Daniel Giménez Cacho in Zama

Don Diego de Zama: Daniel Giménez Cacho
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.

City of God (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002)

City of God is an exceptionally involving docudrama that employs non-professional actors to stunning effect. The only experienced professional in the cast was Matheus Nachtergaele, who played the drug dealer known as "Carrot." The rest were mostly recruited from the streets and slums of Rio, and put through several months of training, largely under the supervision of Lund, who also worked with the cast during filming and is billed as "co-director." Lund had become familiar with Rio's slum-dwellers through her work on music videos and documentary films. The shape of the film, including its flashback structure and use of quick cutting and hand-held camera, is largely that of Meirelles, whose most recent work includes coverage of the opening ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio. And that reliance on flashy camerawork and narrative tricks is, I think, the greatest flaw of City of God. It detracts from some of our involvement in the lives of its characters, turning away from documentary-like reality into sheer "movie-making." Nevertheless, the film successfully immerses us in the violent lives of the people of the favelas. It was a significant critical and even commercial hit, earning four Oscar nominations, a rare feat for a foreign-language film. It wasn't submitted by Brazil for the foreign-language Oscar, but instead was nominated for best director, best adapted screenplay (Bráulio Mantovani from the novel by Paulo Lins), cinematography (César Charlone), and film editing (Daniel Rezende). Some controversy arose when only Meirelles was cited in the directing nomination, but the Academy has strict eligibility rules, and Lund's credit of "co-director" was judged to be a disqualifier. Given my reservations about Meirelles's use of the camera, I think maybe Lund deserved the nomination more than he did.