[The Daily] Venice + Toronto 2017: Lucrecia Martel’s Zama criterion.com /current/posts/4876-the-daily-venice-toronto-2017-lucrecia-martel-s-zama
“Lucrecia Martel is the elusive poet of Latin-American cinema, missing believed lost, the Mary Celeste in human form,” begins the Guardian’s Xan Brooks. “She made La Cienaga and The Holy Girl; split the Cannes audience in two with her brilliant, maddening The Headless Woman. And then, all at once, Martel seemed to vanish. . . . Now Martel is back, after a nine-year absence, with the astonishing Zama, adapted from a novel by Antonio Di Benedetto, about an 18th-century Spanish colony perched on the Asuncion coast. Her 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. It arrives in Venice as if blown in from another world.” A “Spanish crown officer’s exasperated wait for a royal transfer from his lowly South American posting spirals out into a full-blown tropical malady,” writes Variety’s Guy Lodge. “Perplexing and intoxicating in equal measure, Zama is undeniably challenging in its adherence to a mannered, densely narrated literary source: As storytelling, it makes Martel’s last feature, the brilliantly opaque The Headless Woman, look like Agatha Christie. But it honors Di Benedetto’s work by strictly cinematic means, and to formally mesmerizing effect: The frustrating nineyear 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.” “Unlike ostensibly similar slow-cinema films, such as Jauja by her countryman Lisandro Alonso, Martel’s leisurely pacing does not connote a paucity of action or intrigue,” writes Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “If anything, Zama’s sluggish rhythms belie a surfeit of incident: Every scene is steamy with background activity, the air thick with hidden motivations and unspoken crosscurrents. It is heady and tactile, with Tabu DP Rui Poças creating exquisitely precise frames, and sound designer Guido Berenblum then coloring in a whole universe of chirruping crickets and stagnant waters outside them. Every close up is a portrait and every wide a tableau: at one point Zama is taken to task by a sour-tempered superior and we can actually hear the old man blink.” “Few films have done more to unite the international film community than Zama,” suggests Ben Croll at IndieWire. “The nominally Argentinian film is a joint venture between nine other countries as well, and the end credits name figures as diverse as Danny Glover, Pedro Almodóvar, and Gael Garcia Bernal among the many other who jumped on to help this project through a troubled, many year production. Finally complete, Lucrecia 1/2