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Argentina, Brazil, Spain · 2017
1h 55m
Director Lucrecia Martel
Starring Daniel Giménez Cacho, Lola Dueñas, Matheus Nachtergaele, Juan Minujín
Genre Drama
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In the late 18th century, Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish officer settled in a remote South American colony, waits for his superiors to authorize his return home to his wife and family. Years pass and the letter still hasn’t come, forcing Don Diego to find another means of escape.
Martel engages directly with Argentina’s colonial legacy, although her approach remains allusive and layered. She transforms Benedetto’s epic into a dizzying, sensory head trip about a man’s gradual psychological decay, allowing larger historical and political themes to emerge organically from her meticulous formal compositions.
In its own befuddling, bone-dry way, this is a comedy—one that takes fiendish pleasure in puncturing the pomp and circumstance of a cog in the empire-building machine.
Slant Magazine by Christopher Gray
How strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is also a comedy of microaggressions, built on the minor workplace humiliations of a pencil-pusher in the 1790s.
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
For much of its running time, Zama is merely remote and enervating, too accurately reflecting its protagonist’s predicament.
Screen International by Fionnuala Halligan
It’s confusing and heavy and bears down hard until a third-act swerve throws in colours and movement and spins the viewer out of the theatre in wonder. It won’t be forgotten.
The frustrating nine-year wait for new material from Martel has done nothing to blunt her exquisite, inventive command of sound and image, nor her knack for subtly violent exposure of social and racial prejudice on the upper rungs of the class ladder.
The formal control is remarkable, but sometimes almost stultifying, as though Martel had spent every moment of this intervening decade plotting how to pack each scene more densely, to the point it feels like Zama” could maybe stop a bullet. It will certainly deter the less persistent viewer.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
Ms. Martel is exploring the past, how we got here and why, but she is more interested in relations of power than in individual psychological portraits. The monstrous must be humanized to be understood, which doesn’t mean it deserves our tears.
[Martel's] film is haunted, haunting and admittedly prone to the occasional longueur insofar as it runs to its own peculiar rhythm; maybe even its own primal logic.
The Film Stage by Zhuo-Ning Su
It’s tonally and thematically so fragmented, the context simply isn’t there.
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