Zama

Zama is Lucrecia Martel's film adaptation of a celebrated Argentine novel bearing the same name and written in the fifties by Antonio de Benedetto.  I have recently read that novel and, indeed, posted an essay about the book -- the essay is called "On a Boring Novel" (October 2017) and details my objections to de Benedetto's novel.  (I should note that I express a minority opinion -- a number of critics have claimed that the book is wonderful and fascinating.)  Martel's encounter with the book is sometimes literal-minded in a suffocating way -- what she keeps from the novel, she films faithfully and shows astonishing proficiency in capturing the book's general tenor:  an aura of humid, somnolent fecklessness suffuses the film:  people seem to have scarcely the energy to trudge back and forth in their claustrophobic mud-wattled shacks and, so, when the picture shows us violence, the sheer physical energy embodied in those actions seems improbable, even, somehow, fraudulent -- we are underwater, drowned in a syrupy tumid river in which huge catfish grope like blind things in the dense, brown murk.  However, Martel doesn't give the audience much quarter:  de Benedetto's book, at least, provides sufficient exposition for us to know that the action takes place in Asuncion, Paraguay and the author captions the three subparts of his book with the year in which the events take place (around the end of the 18th century).  We get no such information from Martel and she doesn't even afford us the luxury of an establishing shot.  The topography where the film's events occur is unclear, febrile, the landscape of a dream and it's uncertain what era exactly the movie depicts:  people struggle to put on floppy white wigs on occasion, but, when we hear music on the soundtrack, it's sloppy steel guitar, slack-tuned, a sort of jaunty Polynesian mambo, muzak piped in from an elevator in the 1950's.  (The music occurs only sporadically -- mostly the soundtrack buzzes and hums and screeches with nameless insects:  we hear creatures seemingly being eaten alive, crying out and there are ugly thumps and bumps and, sometimes, a kind of percussive fury, other times, a hum that either rises in volume and pitch or bends wildly downward as if simulating some awful kind of tinnitus.)  Martel shows scenes from the book, but she doesn't "narrate" them -- rather, she seems to be simply citing a page here or there.  In one scene, we see Zama's common-law wife with his apparently retarded son happily walking with Zama's scribe and amanuensis, Fernandez.  The scene passes quickly and isn't emphasized -- but, in fact, it stands for about 15 pages in the novel in which Zama inexplicably decides to gift his common-law wife and son to Fernandez, a gift that Fernandez gladly accepts.  Similarly, in one scene shot in near darkness, Zama is lodging in a spooky, haunted house on the edge of town -- we see him talking to a woman who appears as a black silhouette with weirdly frizzy hair; when the woman departs, another woman who looks  just like her unexpectedly emerges from the shadows to take her place:  apparently, she had been lurking there all along.  This scene, which is otherwise scarcely comprehensible, stands for a long section in the book in which Zama tries to figure out exactly how many women are living in the haunted compound that he occupies -- there always seems to be one woman around that he can't quite see.  These examples must stand for many -- Martel adapts the book, but so elliptically that unless you've read the novel, most viewers will have only a dim understanding of what is going on.  Furthermore, she renders the book in the film language deployed so effectively in her first picture La Cienaga ("The Swamp"):  for the most part, we are trapped in hot, humid filthy rooms -- the outdoors is all glare and menace; we often can't tell how the people are related to one another and the camera always seems too close to them -- there's no distance, no landscape really, just moist proximity.  The novel takes place in an Asuncion with churches and a harbor with piers and most of the fixtures of a real city -- Martel films Asuncion as if it were a Neolithic settlement:  it's like Pasolini's approach to Greek myth:  everything takes place is a weird eroded badlands on the edge of a river that looks more like a sea:  the houses are mere mud huts with twig and leaf roofs; in one rare long shot, we see the eroding white chalk cliffs and the scatter of huts with primitive-looking fowl strutting around them and it looks like nothing really on earth. 

Zama is a Spanish bureaucrat, a kind of magistrate judge, assigned to Paraguay.  He years for his wife Marta who he has left behind in Montevideo five-hundred miles down the immense River Plate.  Zama has an insolent subordinate named Ventura Prieto whom he beats and, then, dismisses.  He engages in a flirtation with a merchant's wife who is always drinking small cut-glass snifters of brandy.  The merchant's wife has a mute Black servant who's feet were skinned to keep her from running away -- when Zama comes to visit the woman, the black servant hovers nearby and, later, when the merchant's wife is tired of his visits, the mute, limping woman simply glares at Zama.  Not a word is spoken.  Zama's love affair goes nowhere -- it's too hot to make love anyway.  In the opening scene, Zama, who has the hunted look of a harried fugitive, spies on some naked women bathing in mud -- one of them chases him and Zama turns on her, slapping her ferociously.  (In the novel, this initiates a long passage in which the naked woman's husband demands reparations from him -- Martel doesn't film any of the consequences of the odd encounter.)  The nasty fat little governor decides that the insolent Ventura Prieto must be deported and sends him back to Spain, to the town of Lerma, exactly the place where Zama yearns to be sent.  Zama presides over inconsequential trials.  A savage bandit, Vicuna Porto, is supposedly ravaging the country -- one soldier claims to have killed him however and wears the dead brigand's ears on a string.  (The fat little governor takes the ears and wears them on his chest himself in several scenes).  Later, we learn that Zama has taken a common-law Indian wife and has had a son who can neither walk nor talk.  Zama has been assigned a secretary named Fernandez who is writing a book.  (He has plenty of time to write because no one really has anything to do in this backwater).  There is concern that Fernandez book will impeach the governor and, so, the secretary is also sent away -- possibly back to Spain.  Zama, who is in debt, has to leave his rooms (sometimes invaded by mysterious burglars) and live in a sort of haunted hovel -- he is beset by eerie black women who harangue him.  Some years pass and Zama looks older and more gaunt and he has grown a beard.  He is dispatched to hunt down Vicuna Porto.  The tiny column of soldiers advances into a huge swamp.  They meet wild Indians wearing terrifying birdlike masks.  A huge column of blind people, punished for their crimes by having their eyes put out, wanders across the Pampas and, indeed, walks right through Zama's bivouac.  The blind people seem oddly purposeful and the scene may simply be the dramatization of a dream.  One of the blind women kneads Zama like dough.  A soldier comes to Zama's hammock and announces that he is, in fact, Vicuna Porto -- he's been marching at Zama's side throughout the whole trek.  The Indians invite the Spaniards to a celebration but it turns into some sort of battle with red-painted warriors riding on supernaturally fast horses and entangling the men with their bolos.  The Indians paint the Spaniards red, kill some of them, and leave the rest, including Zama and Vicuna Porto, to march without horses through an endless wet savannah.  On the banks of the river, Porto tortures some of the remaining men, demanding to know where the precious "cocoanuts" are hidden ("cocoanut" is the name for amethyst encrusted geodes, pretty enough but as Zama points out, 'worthless.")  Zama doesn't know where the cocoanuts are located:  he says to Porto:  "I do for you what no one would do for me.  I deny you all hope."  Enraged, Porto cuts off Zama's hands.  In the final scene, Zama lies feverish and dying in a canoe paddled by a small boy through a vividly green, algae-covered swamp -- the slack-tuned Hawaiian guitars play us out to the end.

Martel's direction is impeccable:  she captures the book's mood, eliminating the incredibly tedious love affairs in which nothing ever happens in the middle portion of the novel.  We see all sorts of strange things -- a gunshot thunders on the soundtrack and the camera pans to show a man standing over a horse with a smoking pistol in his hand -- but, in this world, nothing ever is accomplished:  the horse neighs and tries to stand up apparently unwounded, or, at least, very much alive.  There are peculiar camera angles -- we can't make out the relationship of people and animals.  In one scene, a horse seems to stand on a low balcony behind a group of aristocrats.  In another scene, a furry llama wanders around the governor's rooms.  When the Indians attack, they rise out of the grass, appearing from nowhere, dropping from the sky, their motions blinding fast.  A sick man is carried in a chair strapped to a slave's back.   When he dies, the man is put in a basement room and huge clouds of salt are sifted down onto his corpse.  Zama is visually extraordinary -- it's fully accomplished although god knows what a viewer who has not read the novel will make of the thing.  On the other hand, the novel was not entirely clear either and, in fact, was a bit more enigmatic than the movie in some ways -- Martel actually clarifies some aspects of the book.  The defects in the movie are the defects in the book -- here is the problem:   you make a book or a movie about deadly ennui and frustration at your own risk.