Lucrecia Martel’s ‘Zama’ Is Difficult, Beautiful & Cruel [Venice Review] theplaylist.net /lucrecia-martel-zama-review-20170830/ 31/08/2017
Waiting and hoping: In Spanish, the native tongue of Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, and the language of her highly anticipated, frequently delayed new film, the word is the same. It’s not just a trick of linguistics, in “Zama,” to wait and to hope are interchangeable concepts, equally futile and equally agonizing. Both give rise to the same torpid kind of madness. To make a film about expectations repeatedly disappointed and gratification constantly postponed is a challenge that Martel, never known for compromise, takes on with an absolute and unswerving sureness. But her certainty is also slightly terrifying, concealing this enigmatic film’s meaning within a rock-dense, borderline impregnable shell of stunning, disturbing imagery, opaque dissociated dialogue and a pessimistic view of human nature that runs so deep it’s a soul sickness, a spiritual cholera. “Zama” is a difficult film. But if you find a way to crack open its forbidding, austere exterior, there is treasure to be found, or at least something that sparkles, beautiful and cruel, like the spiky insides of a geode.
1/4