Zama

The final shots are both majestic and damning, and they lift the film with a kind of gentle contempt into a surrealism that makes an awful kind of sense, the world in its lushness swallowing Zama as it will swallow us all. Some movies unfold as dreams; Zama dances us playfully toward the edge of nightmare and then asks us to open our eyes.

Ms. Martel’s attention to period detail is impeccable without being show-offish about it. But Zama is not the kind of period piece that aims for suspension of disbelief.

The frustrating nine-year 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.

With Zama, Martel no longer hints at that past, but actively exhumes it, unleashing ghosts in the process.

In its own befuddling, bone-dry way, this is a comedy—one that takes fiendish pleasure in puncturing the pomp and circumstance of a cog in the empire-building machine.

The film makes a compelling portrait of how job assignments can eventually become jail sentences, and how years can drift into each other with little care for unfulfilled dreams. As it goes, Zama ponders the unanswerable question of what kind of life, exactly, is worth living.

All this makes Zama interesting and unique and something to be respected. But none of this translates into anything resembling a satisfying narrative or even entertainment as we know it. Still, as bleak experiments go, Zama is the real thing.

Completely overrated film, a total bore with zero cinematographic qualities. It is an adaptation of an apparently famous Argentinian novel and that shows because the dialogue scenes seem completely out of place with the action. It tries so hard to make a point through hammy surrealistic scenes, it's pathetic. I guess not every "director" is a Tarkovsky or a Terrence Malik. It is a sad example of arty farty left-wing nonsense that is mired in platitutes about colonialism and white guilt. The exotic setting and preachy topic makes it a darling with snobbish critics of course.