Zama

Maybe you’ve had the experience: frittered, wasted, sweated away days, nights, weeks, months in a hot humid and, to you, dismal desolate tormenting tropical backwater?No air conditioning, no fridge, no cold fizzy drinks. Stale beer, stale pleasures. Even the boredoms become stale. Far too few, and shriveling, are the civilized comforts and diversions and esteems, privileges you were so accustomed to. Only the occasional slow boat bringing liquor and other frills and shattered hopes.Days in a daze, squandered on petty procedures, trying to uphold misplaced ill-suited patterns of hierarchy, of dominance and submission, the old value system you inherited and profited from. But now you're becoming less and less at ease with that old imposed dispensation you can’t abandon. But you’re stuck between it and an other dispensation that’s too alien for you, and is so accusatory, antagonistic towards you, or at best indifferent to you, or trying to ignore you. And which anyway, you tell yourself, is dismal and dreary, dusty, and dim compared to the dazzling city delights you fondly recall … Frustrated further in diversions, failed intrigues, false lures … Instead: more and more embarrassments, humiliations, discombobulations of deflated reason and irrational dread ... Nights of fever, time out of joint, unhinged …Waiting for release any day now . . . months become years, decades . . . you become so very familiar, intimate with lassitude, fatigue, heart-break, more incomprehension, entropy, dissipation, hopeless yearning … falling prey more and more to fatuous impulse … as more and more you’re aware you can’t escape your still somewhat sodden but fast dehydrating desiccating self.You’re no all-conquering, astonishing Kurtz at the bend in the river carving from the jungle any insane empire of treasured productions galore. You’re denied even imaginary indulgence as a prince of the realm. But are closer to Prufrock. The mermaids will not sing for you. Will mostly glower at you. You grow old, your hairpiece dry and rolled … but no refuge in gentle drawing rooms where the ladies come and go, not for you. No adoring looks returned. Only more discombobulation, frustration ... You're only one more stranger in a strange land, with fits against the exasperation and discontent only falling flat and worse, ridiculous as a glistening dagger aimed from the tropics straight at the frozen heart of Antartica ... Desperate escapades only fizzling into further futility, banal insanity, fatalism ...While the muddy brown flux flows on. A presence which dissolves all best intentions, craftiest rationalisms, desperate stabs of delusion.The film captures better than any other I've seen (but I haven't seen many) the historical colonial experience of Latin America, or much of the dissipation, etc. Based on the novel by Antonio Di Benedetto which I'll soon read. Works by Roberto Bolaño can also take you into that territory.In other words: a film very worthwhile to muse on, a green entry in a green shade into a heart of darkness still with us.

Unlike La cienaga (the swamp) Martel's Zama is more forward driven with a linear plot. The briefness that takes over each scene with it's relatively small significance lessens the impact of this film. If it's going to be linear I think it should have more details. I ended up caught between a half complete story that was halfway complete. Though this was subversive to the patriarchal gaze and a delight in that sense, the eeriness with "slow cinema", lack of a soundtrack, and partial story was just too much of a mixed bag. I can only compare this to La cienaga at this time (which is one of my favorite films). Be prepared for uncomfortably and a slightly rewarding film that pushes the viewer into feminist film aesthetics. "Ring ring", you may leave now Zama.

I managed to endure 30 minutes! I really tried.Lucretia Martel was anointed a great director in the dark ages of the 2000s, when formalist cinema was all the rage among critics and festival organizers. The cameras were supposed to be fixed, the films were long, the moral was reductionist and simplistic (colonists/rich/bourgeoisie were bad people!). Once in a long while you caught a camera movement and you were supposed to exclaim -- great directing! You can probably guess how things went when critics tried to dictate things to artists. Thankfully those days were gone (although I am still traumatized). _Zama_ is a throwback to that era, and a reminder of what I absolutely *don't* miss. Good riddance.

About a week after I watched the plotless 'Roma', I finally got to Zama which put my wife to sleep in about five minutes. It shut my eyes after about fifteen. The next day, I dialed it up again and once again it sent me to dreamland. Sominex has nothing on 'Zama'. I regrouped gathered in a bunch of coffee and watched. The good news is I stayed awake, the bad news is, It's just like 'Roma', but with more nudity.... MUCH MORE. One would think that all of the nudity could keep me awake. You'd be wrong. I just couldn't get into this. It's beautiful. Costume design, cinematography, and the framing are exquisite. The feature just didn't connect. It's super slow.Too often critics mistake beauty or a well-made film with a good film. This seems to be the case here. I can't find anyone who likes it or who had the patience to stay through it. I feel like I could spoil it right now for you and it wouldn't make a difference, but I'll be a good boy. Final Score: 5.0/10

What imagination produced this movie, with so many unexpected responses and turns of scenery and human responses. It seemed like a journey of the absurd of colonial life efforting to lay over the reality of life in a hot uncivilized indigenous place with despondent slaves... nobody seems to fit where they are... and Zama is miserable, trying to get what he doesn't have and can't seem to work the system of colonial rule, and it seems the indigenous and native life (referring to both people and nature) is trying to swallow him up... it seems he is being called to surrender to it to survive and perhaps actually have a life worth living. That's how I saw the movie..... So man incredible interactions as well as visually stunning images and locations.

If you can make sense out of this mish-mash of unrelated scenes you're better than I am. Even during scenes that seem to make sense there are strange things happening that have no meaning. The acting by the main character is minimal. When he does change his expression it has nothing to do with the situation. There will suddenly be guitar renditions of popular love songs (Harbor Lights, Magic in the Moonlight, Amapola, etc.) that is completely inappropriate. And the film doesn't end - it simply stops. I think the people who praise this mess believe they are being sophisticated and showing their intellect. What a sorry waste of money and my time.

The film was interesting, there was a wonderful texture but as things progressed one started to go "Shall I have a cup of tea?" "What's that mark on the carpet, the mucky terrier i need to make sure his paws are clean!" . Then suddenly the pace changed and it all turned a tad wierd. Maybe I had nodded off and was looking at a different film. We were then "up the jungle" captured by wierd locals and the man who we are looking for is ..well that would be telling. In the end I was going to say it was "Harmless" ..fact is I could have done without the gratuitous brutality!

Neither my wife not I could follow this film. It seemed like a mix of Kafka at his most opaque, Duchamps at his most urinacious, and the Mother Goose Book of Nursery Rhymes at its most inconsequential. Sometimes with a puzzling film or a book it seems worthwhile to have another shot at it, to recuperate it in a different way. But I won't be rewatching this. It already went to the church jumble sale.

A sublime and, at times, very funny meditation on the absurdity of colonialism. Martel is a master film maker.

A wonderful film. Intellectually and technically on the highest level.

Lucretia Martel's hallucinatory, wry, highly cinematic, masterfully directed swipe at colonial arrogance has as much to say about the current state of the world.