Zama. 2017. Argentina. Directed by Lucrecia Martel. 115 min.
Lucrecia Martel (La Cienaga, The Headless Woman) has done the impossible: make a hypnotically, even ecstatically, subversive film out of Antonio di Benedetto’s seemingly unadaptable Argentine novel Zama (1956). Her ingenious political conceit is to shift the book’s attention away from the existential interior monologue of a minor, absurd 18th-century bureaucrat languishing in a Paraguayan backwater of the Spanish colonial empire, to instead give voice to its marginalized characters: the women and the natives. Courtesy of Strand Releasing