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| Daniel Giménez Cacho in Zama |
Zama is an Argentine-born subject of the Spanish Empire stationed in the riverside outpost of Asunción, Paraguay, in the late 18th century. Separated from a wife and children whom he hasn’t seen in years, he longs for a transfer that will finally take him away from the humid backwater. But time passes, no transfer arrives, and Zama finds himself sinking even deeper into a Kafkaesque stasis of bureaucracy, boredom, yearning, and desperation that pushes him beyond the limits of his endurance. The film, a brilliantly executed revisionist take on those familiar tales of imperial rule, adventure, and conquest in faraway, “untamed” lands, is perfectly in keeping with Martel’s previous three films, all of which favoring a lingering, non-linear approach to their unsettling studies of middle- and upper-class characters trapped in suffocating settings, entirely at the mercy of their own nervous energies. La ciénaga (2001), Martel’s extraordinary feature debut, is situated almost entirely on and around the grounds of a decrepit house, La Mandrágora, in which the loathsome, self-absorbed adults slowly rot away in an alcoholic stupor around a putrid swimming pool while their children, caught in the grip of simmering hormones and destructive impulses, go on sweaty excursions into town or roam the surrounding wilderness with rifles and machetes. Portents of death and injury abound: a dead rabbit on a kitchen counter, a water buffalo trapped in mud, the sight of children with missing eyes and bleeding cuts. There is the Buñuelian sense of primal instincts upsetting and overriding the surface-level social order of proper etiquette and acceptable behavior, of nature either reclaiming or lashing out against the toxic world of humans. In Martel’s cryptically constructed follow-up, The Holy Girl (2004), a hotel hosting a medical convention serves as a site of sexual tension and spiritual fervor when an act of abuse perversely motivates a young woman to pursue and bring about the salvation of the unsuspecting perpetrator. And in 2008’s The Headless Woman, the vain, middle-aged protagonist falls into a psychological maelstrom of guilt and denial after a hit-and-run incident in which she may or may not have struck a child. All three films are distinguished by their scathing indictments of the idle, entitled bourgeoisie; cutting critiques of patriarchal social orders and systems of power (women play significant roles in all of Martel’s films, occupying the central roles in her first three); and clear allegiance with typically marginalized characters such as servants, non-whites, and indigenous peoples, all of which are further pursued and explored in intriguing new ways in Zama.
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| Zama |
Just as instrumental to Martel’s unique cinema is her emphasis on the crucial role sound plays in enriching and expanding upon the confining limitations of the image, inviting the larger, more mysterious world beyond the frame to assert itself in the viewer’s experience of the film through an array of surprising, challenging, and creative methods. She demonstrated her mastery of sound design and the tension between on- and off-screen space as early as La ciénaga with its dense sonic tapestry of metal chairs scraping against stone, tinkling glasses and bottles, ringing telephones that go unanswered, rumbling thunder, gunshots, the shouts and shrieks of overexcited children. That film’s sophisticated command of the visual and aural properties of cinema, clever editing, and vivid sensuality amount to a work as rigorous, precise, tactile, and durable as Robert Bresson’s L’argent (1983) or Claire Denis’ Beau travail (1999). As with Bresson, Martel’s devotion to uncovering the potential of sound is absolute, with each film serving as a testing ground for fresh techniques and concepts that bring the world of each film to life as an accumulation of physical details. For her, each new project starts first and foremost with a sound concept around which the rest of the film takes shape. For Zama, one of her first decisions was to use a Shepard tone - a series of gradually ascending or descending scales - in association with instances of further delay or disappointment for Zama, creating the impression of not only free-falling, as Martel specifically intended, but of an increasingly slippery hold on reality and rational thought, as if the very ground underneath the poor functionary’s feet was melting and sliding away. This sensation of feverish wooziness is further underscored by the inspired use of calypso music, conjuring a comically skewed, dreamily lackadaisical feel to Zama’s trials and tribulations. Martel took a similarly creative, idiosyncratic approach to the actors’ spoken dialogue by borrowing the method Mexican soap operas from the 1970s used to reach a wide Latin American audience, blending together different accents - in Zama’s case, from Argentina and the Spanish-Portuguese hybrid language Portuñol - to create a more unusual variation of Spanish to suit the temporally and geographically removed colony setting (the indigenous languages of qom, pilagá, and mbyá guaraní are also spoken throughout the film). To achieve the eerie pre-modern silence that would have prevailed there and then, untainted by noise pollution from cars and trucks, Martel often had to resort to dubbing her actors’ dialogue to bypass the difficulties of recording direct sound. She also made sure to incorporate the sounds of insects into interior scenes to emphasize the lack of a proper division between indoors and outdoors, as most windows at the time lacked glass, and sought out field recordings of insects, birds, and amphibians that gave off strange, mechanical sounds, “almost like malfunctioning radios.” All of these elements and many more contribute to an enthralling vision of the past quite unlike any other, off-kilter yet immersive, layered with just enough eccentricity to effectively illustrate the unsteady, tragicomic nature of Zama’s situation. Elaborating upon the opening sequence, Martel depicts the frustrated Argentine not as an authority figure who is seen, feared, obeyed, and respected, but rather as a measly, insignificant cog in a machine of empire and commerce, an increasingly diminished creature whose torments and desires seem to be open knowledge among the local population, further contributing to his overall ridiculousness. Despite being a married man and father, he pitifully pursues the local treasury minister’s flirtatious wife (Almodóvar regular Lola Dueñas) within the suffocating confines of her manor, but she only deflects his advances while his amused peers casually lob teasing remarks about Zama’s blatant lust directly to his face. Zama also has an illegitimate child with Emilia (María Etelvina Peredez), one of the native women who makes no disguise of her deep contempt for him. Meanwhile, his hopes for any sign of progress towards his coveted transfer become increasingly futile with each setback and delay, leaving him with little else to do but to just keep waiting - for word from the crown, for delayed ships bearing royal mail and overdue payments in their holds, for a sign of mercy or favor from one of the local governors, even for a message from his wife or children, whose prolonged silence carry much weight.
Zama, while suffering from terrible loneliness, is far from alone in his private, inescapable purgatory, as Martel ingeniously surrounds him with a wide range of secondary characters mainly consisting of women, children, indigenous natives, and animals. Further elaborating upon the film's fascinatingly inverted power dynamics, she grants the various servant and slave characters surrounding the Spanish overseers their own special measures of presence, autonomy, and even power, prominently featuring them in numerous scenes in key areas of the frame, sometimes in brazenly colorful costumes, their eyes and passive expressions constantly leveling steady, assured looks of defiance and judgment at the petty, pompous intruders. In its own way, Zama is an even more insightful statement on resistance and revenge against institutional captivity and oppression than Django Unchained (2012); without shedding a single drop of blood, Martel's servants silently, undeniably prevail over their buffoonish "masters." A similar assessment can be drawn from the film's free indigenous characters, who navigate the dense jungle terrain with confidence and ease, for the most part possessing an attitude of indifference to the foreigners' cruelties and desperate, greed-driven fumblings, a position comparable to that shown by the many animals that freely inhabit and wander through the Spanish settlements. In one of the film's most memorable (and instantly meme-able) scenes, a llama bobs into and out of the frame as the straight-faced Zama receives yet another blow of bad news from a governor, hilariously underlining his ever-plummeting irrelevance as only a llama can.
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| Daniel Giménez Cacho in Zama |
Martel portrays Zama as a man trapped and tormented by the vector of desire, to borrow the filmmaker's phrasing, that he has constructed for himself, the allure of his transfer lying in wait for him at the end of an ambiguous timeline has constantly has to adjust and expand with each fresh setback - practically ad infinitum, after a certain point. His obedience and eagerness to please his Spanish overseers all go unrecognized or are overridden by the succession of matters that keep arising, demanding his attention: the sudden death of a visiting merchant (Carlos Defeo) and the subsequent burial arrangements that must be made, the hilarious discovery that one of Zama's own men (Nahuel Cano) has been secretly writing a book on the crown's time and want Zama to be his first reader, a property inventory that forces Zama to relocate to a rotting, possibly haunted hut. But the roots of Zama's perpetual torment extend not to the greater forces of circumstance or rotten luck that keep throwing up obstacles between him and his goal, but within him, to the very core of his identity. At one point, Zama's deputy Ventura (Juan Minujín) bluntly tells him, "You're talking to a man astonished by the number of Americans who want to pass for Spaniards instead of being what they are," thus openly addressing both the mission Martel has firmly pursued since La ciénaga to provide a fuller and more accurate representation of Argentine national identity comprised of lower-class, native-born, and indigenous groups rather than those with European backgrounds and sentiments and Zama's misguided attempts to bury his own Argentine origins and curry favor from his Spanish-born colleagues and superiors - a goal doomed from the very start. In one last attempt to please the distant, never-seen king of a faraway country not even his own, a weary, bearded Zama volunteers for a mission to find and kill the elusive bandit known as Vicuña Porto whose violent antics have been wreaking havoc with local trade. This perilous adventure, shot in the wilderness of Argentina's Chaco region, takes up the final third of Zama, in which Martel deftly steers clear of the typical trippy descent into madness so familiar from films like Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). Not to say that Zama doesn't make a swerve into the strange, the uncertain, and the existential as Zama and his men experience a disorienting, transformative passage of revelation, captivity, mistrust, betrayal, and greed before arriving in a neutral zone of sand, water, and purest green, reduced to what they were all along: mere men, only now far beyond the trappings of power, class, rank, or wealth. It is here where Zama finally, quite literally learns to let go, freeing himself of all aspirations and pursuits except the one that matters the most: simply, to live and be content, regardless of his place in the world. All there is is the present, and real, lasting happiness is attainable, but only outside the constraints of any vector.
