Zama film review: Highly original Argentine adaptation surprises with brutality and lyricism

Late on in Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel’s startling, highly original new feature, Zama, a character who has just had both his arms cut off, is advised to “shove your stumps in the sand … if you don’t bleed out, you’ll survive.” It’s a grisly, darkly humorous moment in a film that continually surprises us with both its brutality and its lyricism.

Zama is set in the late 18th century. Its main character is the world-weary and very melancholy South American-born “corregidor,” Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho). He is working very far from home as an administrator for the Spanish colonial government in a remote country. In spite of the exotic music which fills the soundtrack, the place is a complete backwater, not any kind of island paradise. Cholera is rife. The heat is oppressive. Zama is desperate to go home or to be posted somewhere else. He is very far away from his wife and children, who are growing up without him.

The Spaniard is a bystander and a voyeur. He is first seen here walking by the shore, staring with longing at waters he yearns to cross. We then see him lying on the beach, watching as some naked local women enjoy a mud bath. One of the women spots the peeping tom and comes after him. A sequence that starts in comic fashion ends in grim fashion as he gives her a savage beating.

We are used to stories like Aguirre, The Wrath Of God or Heart Of Darkness which portray colonial adventurers as dark or tormented souls who lose their moral bearings the further they venture away from western ‘civilisation.’ In adapting Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel for the screen, writer-director Martel offers a very different perspective on the colonial experience. She doesn’t just show the casual cruelty toward the indigenous people or the bad faith of the westerners. She also concentrates on the mind-numbing boredom the colonialists experience in their day to day lives and shows how this boredom warps their behaviour.

Zama is prey to lust, petty jealousy and even to hallucinations. He has slept with local women. Early in the film, he sees a young boy with prophetic powers who taunts him as the “man of justice,” the “man without fear.” He and the other colonialist officers treat their servants with contempt, seeming barely to notice them as they carry on their private conversations around them. They, in turn, are treated with indifference by their own bosses.

At times, Zama seems like a period version of Franz Kafka’s beleaguered office worker, Joseph K, in The Trial. He is told that his transfer might indeed be possible. The Governor has just sent the first letter on his behalf. “In a year or two, we’ll send the second,” the governor informs him, making it clear that he won’t escape any time soon.

Zama prefers to stand on the outside of events looking inward. In the end, very much against his will, he is forced to take a leading role in the hunt for the rebellious bandit, Vicuña Porto. Martel shoots the action sequences in incongruously laid-back fashion. There is violence and bloodshed but it is filmed in a completely matter of fact way. When the colonialists fall into the hands of the indigenous warriors, they are dragged around at the end of halters as if they are livestock. This doesn’t seem to affect their strangely courtly behaviour. They’re very politely spoken, even at the most fraught moments.

Martel made her name with her debut feature, La Ciénaga (The Swamp), in 2001, a satirical look at decay and corruption among Argentina’s sinking middle-classes. Her new film may be set deep in the past but some of its themes overlap with those of the earlier movie. Both deal with ennui and bad faith. Zama himself is caught between cultures. He fancies himself as a sophisticated European but he lives thousands of miles from Madrid. He doesn’t belong either to the Old World or to the new one. “Europe is best remembered by those who were never there,” he is told by the beautiful aristocrat Luciana (Lola Dueñas), the object of his lust.

The film is the story of a breakdown. In his colonial backwater, Zama is slowly going mad. He is a functionary, a magistrate working for the crown, who has lost all sense of purpose. His extreme solemnity only adds to the comedy and pathos in his plight. He is a quixotic figure with such an exaggerated sense of his own dignity and importance that he is always setting himself up for a fall. Giménez Cacho plays the hapless anti-hero in deadpan fashion. He is so resigned to his fate that he takes each new misfortune in his stride. He expects the worst and that is almost always what he gets.