5 Women Filmmakers
March 3–March
20, 2019
In celebration of Women’s History Month, the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, and the Boston Women’s Film Festival co-present five new films by
contemporary women. Visit mfa.org for information.
In a blend of
fable, parable, legend, and magical realism, Lucretia Martel’s Zama tantalizes the literary,
art-loving filmgoer with unending sensory and intellectual stimulation. Do you
love Kafka, Beckett, South American literature, surreal moments of the mind,
and stunningly creative use of music, sound, location, and cinematography? Zama
may have no competitor in recent film art.
The
story jumps right in with both structure and moral truth, but takes a few
minutes to grasp its richly nuanced sequence. Humor periodically strikes
through the “voice” and leitmotif of Latin guitar music in a soundtrack that mainly
employs the language of natural sound: silence, cicadas, birds, eerie whistles
and rattles, barking, neighing, a lazily sweeping fan, children’s laughter or
squawks, and women’s intimate chatter. Then, there are the blasts of surreal
electronic dissonance that represent the human mind when it hears bad news. The
music mirrors the emotion, and sound carries the story along more than the
characters’ dialogue.
South
American-born Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), in his late-thirties
and dressed in a red-velvet jacket and three-cornered hat, holds the
prestigious position of magistrate under Spain’s colonial governor, in a
backwater Paraguayan community in the 1700s. Don Diego does his job as “the
crown’s functionary,” but he longs for—and persistently requests—a transfer to Lerma,
a city near his wife and children. But years keep passing, along with new
governors and foiled efforts for a transfer. Don Diego exists in a slow-growing,
living nightmare, which can’t even end in death. It’s a simple storyline but an
endlessly rich brew, perhaps because it’s based on a highly regarded novel by Antonio
di Benedetto (1922–1986) and reimagined by a brilliant director.
The
stage is set in one of the movie’s first scenes for an immersion in absurdity
and magical realism. An indigenous prisoner is set free by Don Diego, but instead
of leaving the rough-hewn office, the prisoner bends his head like a torpedo
and races straight into a wall in inexplicable self-destruction. Such scenes
occur throughout the film, eliciting astonishment on the faces of the witnesses,
but that’s all. They say and do nothing about such occurrences. In the case of
the prisoner, the witnesses are Don Diego, his Spanish deputy Ventura Prieto
(Juan Minujín), and their young scribe Fernández (Nahuel Cano). We then hear a voice
telling us a proverb that foreshadows Don Diego’s fate:
"There’s a fish
that spends its life swimming to and fro, fighting water that seeks to cast it
upon dry land. Because the water rejects it. The water doesn’t want it. These
long-suffering fish . . . devote all their energies to remaining in place.
You’ll never find them in the central part of the river but always near the
banks."
The
camera then shifts from a scene of swarming fish in water to Don Diego standing
alone on his outpost’s desolate river embankment—“the long-suffering fish.”
Ambiance
and mood define this movie—the tropical heat, languor, and ennui of an isolated,
primitive settlement. Time barely moves, torpor settles over everything, which nature’s
sounds magnify—the cicadas’ buzz, a horse’s shudder, a gull’s caw, the river’s eternal
lapping, and the sun’s relentless pulse. It’s barely tolerable for a non-native
and shares the oppressive quality of Herzog’s Aguirre on the Amazon. No wonder
Diego and others look for amusement in the “Oriental’s” cargo of brandy that
arrives, or in sensuous afternoons in bedrooms. (In a nice touch, the rough-and-ready
brandy shipment lands on “Getaway Beach.”)
The
film moves through dreamlike, often hallucinatory settings and scenes. In one,
Diego wanders through disparate
rooms that feed through stalls to the object of his desire, Luciana Piñares
de Luenga (Lola Dueñas), the
elaborately wigged wife of the absent Minister of the Treasury. In this real
but unreal realm, animals
and humans coexist—goats, dogs, horses, lamas—and move around each other,
touching impersonally but familiarly. Diego’s mission in seeking out Doña
Luciana is twofold: to
inform her of the Oriental’s brandy shipment and to advance his flirtation with
her. Doña
Luciana is a notorious paramour, but in mounting scenes she consistently
rejects Diego—“Let’s not be reckless,” she murmurs like a lover, leading him on.
In
another hallucinatory scene, Diego searches for Dr. Palos because the Oriental
and his young son have succumbed to a tropical fever. Diego moves through a
hazy room where a cigar-smoking hag performs a spiritual rite with a ragtag
following. A naked baby crawls around the floor. Diego finally finds the doctor
sitting under a table in a dead stupor.
In
another episode, the governor gallops on horseback into the municipal
courtyard, loses his temper when his horse doesn’t obey a command, and takes
instant revenge on the animal by shooting it. Bystanders, including Diego, stare
at the scene, but as usual say and do nothing, for it’s just another everyday occurrence
in their distorted cosmos.
Much
later in the film, a tribe of blind people wander through the mysterious night woods
where Diego and his fellow bounty hunters (of the legendary Vicuña) sleep. We
hear strange, haunting music. The campers lie still, watching these ghostly,
humming figures as they untie and steal the campers’ horses in their seamless
glide through the trees. Soon after, a warrior tribe with red-stained bodies
upend the posse in a series of surreal, violent scenes—mirroring the increased surrealness
of Diego’s mind. At this point, he simply accepts what comes, too beleaguered
and demoralized to care, or to try to rationalize human life. Everything we see
through his eyes is skewed, bizarre, corrupt, or inhumane, such as, early on,
the Oriental’s son being carried in a crude chair on the back of a slave. The
distance from shore to settlement isn’t far, but “class” has to be
distinguished in this cruel way. At Doña Luciana’s house, a slave sits
utterly still like a bronze statue, pulling the rope of a sweeping fan for the
duration of his life. Its languid, perpetual rhythm with a monotonous squeak emphasizes
the human torture.
The
film has a subplot of Vicuña Porto, a violent outlaw no one has ever seen. He’s
either alive or dead, real or mythical, and he’s a force to be reckoned with in
the colony’s life and adds a neat twist to Diego’s denouement. As the movie
winds up with the bounty hunters now starved and tattered after years of
fruitless search, one of them, “Gaspar Toledo,” who might actually be Vicuña, spits
at Diego, “It’s just a name, that’s all!” He means Vicuña’s a name that
embodies all the evil perpetrated by man.
Like
Odysseus’s impediments to reaching Ithaca, Diego meets obstacle after obstacle
in his effort to transfer home to his wife and children. The first governor,
who has put him off for years, punishes Diego for getting into a brawl with his
deputy Ventura, a real Spaniard
working for the crown, not an American Spaniard like Diego, or as the governor
hurls at him: “an American passing for Spaniard.” A lama brushes against Diego
as he gets this news, absurdly, but also grouping Diego in the animal’s lower
status. The next governor spends his time gambling and playing games. When
forced, he pays sadistic lip service to helping Diego. Meanwhile Diego’s psychic
and physical states continue to decline. He’s demoted to filthy, decrepit housing
near the indigenous people, including Emilia, mother of his illegitimate
toddler. In his new room, one of his wooden crates of belongings suddenly moves
across the floor. He’s told by his scribe Fernández that there’s a boy inside. Oh,
that explains it—a boy inside. Nothing unusual. At this juncture, Diego’s
official jacket has become ragged, his hat tattered, and his face worn. By the
time the next governor arrives, which is years later, Diego is gray-bearded with
dead eyes. He has lost faith but still retains a drop of hope that he might yet
escape by joining the richly clad governor’s “posse” heading out to capture the
mythical villain Vicuña.
The
last scene is apocalyptic. A dazzling sight beholds us—a river covered in ultra-verdant
aquatic moss and studded with fantastical trees. It’s unnatural. It could be
paradise or purgatory. Diego, an ashen corpse but not quite dead, floats in the
river’s viscous green in a rudimentary basin. An indigenous boy hovers above him, staring
in awe at Diego’s horrid, maimed condition. Finally the boy asks harshly, “Do
you want to live?” It’s the movie’s essential question to us all. We have just
journeyed through a true rendition of life, of the human condition and its
inherent, incorrigible vileness—“Do we want to live?”
The
floating boat reminds us of both Ophelia drifting down the river and of Charon
crossing the River Styx with his latest passenger bound for Hades. Diego may be
caught between two worlds—the sticky unreality of the green “non-paradise” that
symbolizes “reaching home,” and the black depth of human souls desiccated and
decayed from their class hubris, their greed, power, and inhumanity. As a last
touch, the folksy, ironic Latin guitar music pipes in, laughing at all of us.
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Ophelia
(1851–1852), Sir John Everett Millais, Tate
|
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Charon on River Styx, Soumyajit Dey, India |
