ZAMA_Lucrecia Martel a director who Confounds & Thrills

Lucrecia Martel: A Director Who Confounds and Thrills nytimes.com/2018/04/13/movies/lucrecia-martel-zama-argentina.html

By J. HOBERMAN

April 13, 2018

When the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel expresses admiration for those directors who challenge reality, she could be talking about herself.

Although known mainly to cinephiles, Ms. Martel is considered by many to be her nation’s, or even Latin America’s, pre-eminent filmmaker. In an essay about her first feature, “La Ciénaga” (The Swamp), the Argentine film scholar David Oubiña praised “a body of work that from the beginning, has radiated a rare perfection.”

“Zama,” the 51-year-old director’s new feature and her first in nearly a decade, has been greeted with equally high regard: Manohla Dargis of The New York Times said she would program the historical drama as part of her “dream festival,” and The Guardian’s Xan Brooks called it astonishing, “a left-field masterpiece.”

In her previous movies, Ms. Martel — who, with her casual attire, long hair and oversized cat’s-eye glasses, could almost pass for a graduate student — focused largely on family relations. She does not, however, see herself as a maker of women’s films. “Romantic comedies are my enemy,” she said, speaking through an interpreter a few days after “Zama” was shown at the New York Film Festival last fall.

Given the originality of her oblique style, near-documentary fascination with large families and taste for depicting provincial inertia, Ms. Martel both excites and confounds viewers.

Her vivid, elusive movies are observational and fragmented, agitated and entropic in equal 1/4

measure, populated by accident-prone characters notable for their absence of selfawareness.

By STRAND RELEASING 1:56 Trailer: ‘Zama’

Trailer: ‘Zama’ A preview of the film.

By STRAND RELEASING on April 12, 2018. Photo by Strand Releasing.

It is tempting to attribute Ms. Martel’s intimacy and ease in directing ensemble casts to her own experience. Raised in Salta, a city tucked in Argentina’s northwest corner at the foot of the Andes and the edge of the rain forest, she was one of seven siblings, and, she said, the child charged with making her prosperous family’s home movies.

The films of Ms. Martel’s so-called Salta Trilogy — “La Ciénaga,” which established her reputation when it was shown at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival; and “The Holy Girl” and “The Headless Woman,” which had their premieres in competition at Cannes — are dryly comic and, at times, horrifying domestic dramas. Their stories develop as if in a hothouse, from a compost of recurring riffs and seemingly unrelated microincidents.

Set mainly at a medical convention held in a dilapidated family-owned hotel, “The Holy Girl” (2004) details a teenager’s self-appointed mission to redeem the middle-aged doctor who rubbed up against her in a crowd. “The Headless Woman” (2009) concerns a well-off matron’s addled response to an automobile accident in which she may or may not have hit something or someone.

Ms. Martel avoids establishing shots and, at times cutting away from the action, favors abrupt transitions. Her skewed framing and use of focus can be unsettling, something she has slyly attributed to her myopia. Her most formally radical film, “The Headless Woman,” is deliberately disorienting, putting the viewer in the position of its discombobulated protagonist.

Following the Salta films, Ms. Martel decided to switch gears. Her next project was an adaptation of Héctor Germán Oesterheld’s graphic novel “El Eternauta” (The Eternal), a science-fiction fantasy critical of Argentine authoritarianism by a writer who was apparently murdered by the regime during the “dirty war” of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. As someone who grew up in those years, Ms. Martell described the period as a more sinister version of her films: “Things happened with no explanation, especially for a kid,” she said, citing mysterious cars, bloodstains and even corpses in the street.

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A scene from “Zama,” based on Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel. Rei Cine, Bananeira Filmes, El Deseo, Patagonik After two years developing a script, without securing financing and the necessary rights, Ms. Martel abandoned “El Eternauta.” It was then that she discovered Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel, “Zama,” which sat unread on her shelf for five years before she brought it with her on a trip along the Paraguay River, where much of the book is set.

Asked if she saw a film in it, she replied in English: “Immediately!”

If Ms. Martel’s earlier work challenged reality, “Zama” — a costume drama set in the late 18th century made for $3.5 million, a modest budget though more than double that of “The Headless Woman” — is a movie in which the director challenged herself. She spent four years writing the script and raising money. (Eight nations helped produce the movie; among the many co-producers are Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar, Gael García Bernal and Danny Glover.) The shoot, which lasted a bit more than two months, was arduous, plagued by bad weather; postproduction was delayed by illness. (Ms. Martel has said she was treated for cancer and is reportedly in remission.)

Ms. Martel’s first digitally shot film, her first set outside Salta, her first period film and her first adaptation, “Zama” is also her first centered on a man, although, as she points out, the frustrated Don Diego de Zama, a South American-born functionary of imperial Spain posted in a remote Paraguayan backwater, resembles many of her female characters. Played by the Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho in a state of wounded dignity, Zama is a confused provincial, frustrated, self-deluded and clinging to a precarious sense of cultural superiority.

As the Kafkaesque drama of a man unable to get a transfer, “Zama” shares the dislocation and torpor characteristic of the Salta Trilogy. But disconcertingly beautiful and at times otherworldly, the movie’s spacey final movement recalls Werner Herzog adventures like

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“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo.” Ms. Martel does not take this as a compliment. “His films bother me,” she said, citing what she sees as their “irresponsible treatment of animals and indigenous people.”

The veteran Argentine film critic and festival director Eduardo Antin, who writes under the name Quintin, noted that however faithful to the Di Benedetto novel the film is, Ms. Martel made the material “consistent with her political interests” by bringing “the background to the foreground.” Di Benedetto focused on Zama and his would-be European milieu and largely ignored the colony’s enslaved people and indigenous inhabitants. Martel includes Africans and Indians, most often women, in nearly every frame. Zama’s story is also theirs. “Such a change requires great will and precise thinking,” Mr. Antin wrote in an email. It also serves to set up the movie’s horrifying “Heart of Darkness” ending.

Ms. Martel hopes to return to Salta, where she has been working on a documentary about Javier Chocobar, an indigenous activist who was killed in a land dispute in 2008. “The history of our country is broken,” she said, referring to Argentine identification with Europe.

“It’s a conflict for every white man” — and crucial to an understanding of the existential antihero Zama.

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