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Zama
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To the Victims of Expectation
Ten minutes into Zama,
the central character, Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), is called to
the shore to receive an unexpected visitor, a trader from Montevideo. Cut to an
establishing shot of several unfamiliar people moving and milling about Zama –
an image that does not establish (in the conventional mode of narrative
exposition) very much at all. Then the film transits to a close-up of a wary
Zama, placed on the left-hand side of the frame, bringing to his lips the drink
that his associate, Indalecio (Germán de Silva), has just poured for him.
Various shouts, from off-screen, ping around the sound mix. Indalecio, also
off-screen, presents his request for administrative help with the visitor’s
business affairs (“Your relationship with the Treasury Minister is good?”) to
Zama, who is still in his off-centre close-up.
Several subjects are elliptically raised in their
conversation as the shot churns on: the state of Zama’s family back in Spain;
the lack of salary payments to him and his colleagues. Finally, Indalecio
strides through the frame, with his back to us and quickly becoming blurred in
the camera’s focal range. Jump-cut to the introduction of the rather nervous new
character we have been awaiting, referred to as The Oriental (Carlos Defeo),
feebly holding an umbrella for shade.
Just when we might imagine the scene has reached a
relatively straightforward level of explication, something decidedly strange
and dreamlike occurs: again floating in an out-of-focus blur behind Zama’s head
is a child (Oriental Son, played by Vicenzo Navarro Rindel) being carried aloft
in a chair; the boy turns to his off-screen servant and whispers that Zama is
“a god who was born old and can’t die. His loneliness is atrocious.” “Are you
talking to me?”, inquires Zama, as a synthesized note (the musical device known
as the Shepard Tone) disorientingly begins on the soundtrack, and the child’s
recitation (no longer tied to the movement of his lips) continues to spin Zama’s
fabulous legend.
Lucrecia Martel’s Zama is, alongside everything else that can be said about it, an extraordinary work
of adaptation. Martel speaks of having entered not only the world of Antonio Di
Benedetto’s remarkable 1956 novel of the same name, but also the inner
processes of the Argentine author’s creative imagination. While following the
basic outline of the book, Martel takes the usual liberties involved in
page-to-screen adaptation: characters are subtracted, events are condensed,
interior monologues are transposed into exterior dialogues. But Martel has
allowed herself a far greater margin of freedom in this genuine re-imagining of the novel.
In the scene described above, for example, an incident
from the book is faithfully staged and recreated, yet at the same time it is
approached and rendered obliquely:
the choice of angles, the atmospheric sound design, the ellipses, and the
decisions to push so much of the action into either off-screen space or blur:
all serve to constantly redefine and transform the nominal centre of the
action.
Not to mention those sudden swerves from reality to
fantasy – two realms that are never quite distinct, anyhow, right from the
opening moments. Each shot (sometimes a long-take sequence-shot) is a
microcosmic cell that expands in our heads and refers to every other cell in
the film; Martel speaks of setting up complex deep-focus fields of action and
then deciding to shoot them very simply and directly, as the entry point into
this shifting miasma.
While Zama can be watched and appreciated in a self-contained way, without prior knowledge
of Di Benedetto’s book, it also gains enormously from a back-and-forth
experience shuttling between novel and film. Like Raúl Ruiz’s Time Regained (1999), it is at once a commentary upon, and
a dream of, its rich source of inspiration.
In this late 18th century-set tale of the
Spanish colony of Asunción in Paraguay, Martel deliberately withdraws certain
connections between the events as described by Di Benedetto – all the better to
make her film a kind of narrative archipelago (as Saad Chakali has described the work of Claire Denis), a floating set of possible scenes and situations. In the
process, certain incidents become even more mysterious than in the novel.
Whereas Zama, in the book, begins by snooping upon the
lady Luciana Piñares de Leunga (Lola Dueñas) and her entourage bathing by the
shore, in the film this object of his gaze – and more so, his listening to the
spoken music of dual languages – is not immediately clear (all the women are
caked in mud). A consequence from the novel is lacking: the challenge to Zama
of a duel issued by Luciana’s aggrieved husband. Yet both versions of the
bathing scene end in the same, abrupt way: with Zama brutally slapping the
naked woman who, in a bold, chastising and possibly playful spirit, pursues
him.
There will surely be many commentaries on Zama as a film about the politics of
colonialism, past and present: as such, it can be networked with a lively range
of pertinent comparisons, from Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) to James Gray’s The Lost City of Z (2016) and – closer
to Martel in style and tone – Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja (2014). In some senses, however, Zama plays down this ever-lurking, political theme. The Zama we see,
after all, is no adventuring, voyaging hero. Passing time in this colonial
outpost has made him little more than a petty bureaucrat, and a pretty
ineffectual one even at that level.
All Zama can do now is wait – wait for official
permission to travel elsewhere, a dispensation that keeps getting granted to
everyone else (even those criminally indicted) but not to him. Zama is about a prolonged, agonised
process of mundane waiting (Di Benedetto was a Kafka fan) – a process that
hollows out personal identity and dashes all lingering hope. The novel is
dedicated a las víctimas de la espera – “to the victims of expectation”. And
Zama’s only moment of genuine self-realisation comes when he is, at last, able
to offer someone what he himself has never enjoyed: words of truth without any false
promise of hope attached.
Zama’s distorted mirror-double, on all levels, is the
equally legendary outlaw, Vicuña Porto (an impressively sinister, disquieting
role for Brazilian actor Matheus Nachtergaele). We constantly hear that Vicuña
is feared by all, that he is seemingly able to infiltrate anywhere and rape,
wound or kill anyone – but this is always countered by the official advice that
he has been “killed a thousand times already”. That is, until Vicuña indeed
materialises, when and where we least expect him, in the latter stages of the
story. But the myth of this villain who can withstand a thousand deaths
constitutes a mockery in Zama’s mind: for he, by contrast, is the hero “born
old”, whose former glory days can seemingly never be resurrected.
In Di Benedetto’s novel – and this we can read etched
into the darting eyes and tense facial muscles of Daniel Giménez Cacho – Zama
is forever contemplating his wonderful past in relation to his dire present and
his even less certain future, but without any teleological reassurance that
these three Zamas constitute the same person: “Perhaps this present Zama who
claimed to resemble the Zama to come was built upon the Zama who once was,
copying him, as if timidly venturing to interrupt something” (from Esther
Allen’s superb translation published by New York Review Books in 2016).
Martel has frequently recounted her unique approach to
cinematic storytelling: a narrative does not go in a single line straight ahead,
but rather, once initiated, constantly spreads out in all directions at once,
creating multiple echoes, inversions, virtual or imagined events. Adapting Zama confronted her with the challenge
all screenwriters face when handling a novel told in the first person: how much
of that interior narration can be kept as it is (in voice-over), displaced
elsewhere (into dialogue), or somehow transposed to another register, another
stylistic level?
Martel took the brave and undoubtedly risky move of
foregoing what constitutes a very large part of the novel’s appeal: Zama’s tortuous
(and blackly funny) justification, in his head, of every bizarre action he
takes – especially in regards to the various women in his life.
But the overall, super-charged ambience that surges
though the pages of the book – the layering of different historical times, the
melting and transforming of identities, the slow entropy of heroic, masculine
orientation – is what Martel catches to perfection in her dazzling weave of
images and sounds, musical selections from different periods, gestures and colours
(even as the final credits roll, the background colours cannot stop themselves
mutating).
While much of what Martel elaborates in Zama can be more or less traced to
specific incidents, preoccupations and reflections contained in the novel, I
suspect that it is an almost casual, throwaway line of Di Benedetto’s that
inspired her most profoundly. Zama describes one of his exchanges with Luciana
thus: “I had the disagreeable impression that she was forgetting herself and
speaking to me as if I were a woman”.
Martel has remarked in interviews that the arduous,
eternal waiting that Zama undergoes aligns him with the common life-experience
of many women. The story of learning to live without hope – of possibly
escaping the fate of being a victim of expectation – is one she saw reflected
in a suitably feminised imagining of
Don Diego de Zama.
MORE Martel: AI © Adrian Martin April 2018 |