“I have seen Zama, and it does indeed have a llama,” announces Cinema Scope editor Mark Peranson in the new issue. “The mysterious circumstances of the film’s long-overdue birth into this world continue with an out-of-competition slot in Venice, an odd happenstance which you can interpret as you wish. I’m not a big fan of second-guessing, but I have my own hypotheses,” the first of which has to do with the fall festivals jostling their schedules to make room for “Oscar bait.” At the same time, “it could very well be that the programmers in Venice just didn’t like Zama that much.” Whatever the case, Toronto honored Lucrecia Martel with a slot in the Masters program, and I carried on updating the “Venice + Toronto” entry with clips, links to reviews and interviews and so on through September 18. Martel will be on hand for Q&As this evening and again on Monday as the New York Film Festival presents Zama as part of its Main Slate.
José Teodoro has an outstanding piece on Zama in the current issue of Film Comment; it’s not online, but he snips a bit of it himself for the introduction to his interview with Martel, which is online: “There are many ways in which Zama, Martel’s first feature in nine years, represents a departure for the Argentine writer-director. It is her first literary adaptation [of Antonio Di Benedetto’s eponymous 1957 novel], her first period film, her first film with a male protagonist, her first film in which widescreen compositions largely emphasize verticality instead of horizontality, and her first feature to be set outside of her native province of Salta. Yet, while Zama represents a new frontier for Martel, it also continues and even deepens her singular, allusive approach to class, gender, race, and place, as well as still more cryptic notions of destiny and vocation.”
“If one of the principal powers and pleasures of cinema is its ability to momentarily suspend thoughts or cares about what lies outside the frame—and to trap us in rapt, passive contemplation of everything within it—then Zama can be taken an object lesson in manipulation,” suggests Adam Nayman, writing for Reverse Shot. “Every strenuously controlled moment and movement constitutes an irresistible entreaty to simply go blank and watch.” Zama “reflects the same furtive, obsessive visual focus as its predecessors,” starting with La Ciénaga (2001), “a film whose thick, simmering atmosphere of dog-day-afternoon torpor is uncannily affecting. . . . The heroine of The Holy Girl (2004) stumbles around in somnambulistic thrall to desires she feels yet cannot fully apprehend (no wonder the soundtrack is dominated by the theremin). The title character in The Headless Woman (2008) is dazedly puppeteered by her friends and family to forget her own culpability in a terrible crime, post-concussion syndrome as an amnesiac state of grace.”
“Zama places the existential ennui of Beckett and the administrative hopelessness of Kafka within a 17th century context,” writes Michael Sicinski. “In so doing, Benedetto, and by extension Martel, are identifying a sense of dislocation and madness at the very heart of Spain's colonial project and the civilization of South America. Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a functionary of rank, a man who has spent years wasting away in Paraguay and wants to be reassigned to Argentina, where his wife has been waiting for him. . . . Everything goes wrong. . . . The plot, such as it is, is episodic and bitterly comedic, Martel taking a sly, savage delight in fleshing out this fussy would-be aristocrat and bringing him low.”
“Fearing marauders and seeking to subjugate the indigenous population while making use of their labor, Zama finds his loyalties divided and his desires manipulated in a series of intensely condensed dramatic tableaux, which Martel ingeniously renders simultaneously stark and teeming,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “She develops a cinematic style, marked by tense closeups, asymmetrical framings, offscreen voices, and sharp contrasts in focus, that fits the subject with a singular precision. The relentless plotting of potentates and labors of servants and slaves fill the onscreen space with a seemingly combustible tension—and then long-stifled violence surges to the fore. Few films convey such amplitude so sparely; it’s a two-hour film that feels like it’s twice that length, not in sitting-time but in narrative scope and dramatic detail.”
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Keith Uhlich puts in a word for “the gorgeously askew photography by Rui Poças, regular collaborator of Miguel Gomes and João Pedro Rodrigues. This is a somnolent symphony of disappointment and delay. . . . There's a sense that even the movie itself, which emerged after a reportedly tumultuous production period, is perched on some divide between actuality and non-being. That's a tricky line—one that Martel walks, in spite of any extra-textual obstacles, with supreme confidence throughout.”
Variety’s Esla Keslassy reports that Strand Releasing has picked up North American rights with an eye to release Zama in theaters early next year.
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