Lucrecia Martel’s latest marvel sees the effects of colonialism take their toll on conquistadors.

The opening image of Lucrecia Martel’s Zama sees Don Diego of Zama, staring out at the horizon, stood in a Captain Morgan-esque pose. In crimson red garb with a sword holstered at his side. He’s waiting, and hoping, to be transferred to Lerma, Argentina where his wife and children are waiting for him to rejoin them. Though while Don Diego waits on this beach in Paraguay, their lives go on while he seems stuck in place; stuck in time. In these initial frames, he appears a stark comparison to Paraguay’s native inhabitants, set to work in the background of the shot, slaving away. In a later scene, he will find his petition for transfer denied, on account of an altercation. A fight occurred between then and now, instigated by him, but his status as the superior officer involved complicates things. He can’t be reprimanded as easily as someone more lowly though finds himself paying the higher price as his subordinate was given the choice of where to be redeployed only to choice Lerma.

As he receives this crushing news, a llama dips in and out of Rui Poças’ steady frame, pulling attention even if the focus never shifts. Roaming where it pleases. It’s hard not to laugh at the farcical nature of the scene, at Don Diego’s misfortune. Following this, he gazes out at the horizon once again, with similar posture and in the same garb as before, yet stands as less authoritative. In the time between the first scene and now, Martel’s managed to cut him down to size, but she’s not content to stop here, Zama still has further to fall.

The Argentinian director made a splash back at the start of the century with La Ciénaga, a more contemporary, equally scathing indictment of her country’s bourgeoisie and their awfulness. The audience viewed this in near-constant claustrophobic close-ups where the sweltering clamminess was able to truly set in, as they waiting for the family on-screen to end up at one another’s throats, even if they were practically that close to one another already. That moment never truly arrived, it was a work built around a sense of ennui, an alleged “calm” before the storm. The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman followed close behind, both of them being built around similar ideas and thematics as their protagonists unraveled without being overtly prompted to do so.

Zama marks Martel’s first feature in ten years –– a project born out of her adaptation of The Eternaut falling apart –– and sees her jump back in time to adapt Antonio Di Benedetto’s 1956 novel of the same name –– which was only translated into English in 2016, and is something I haven’t not yet gotten around to. Though from my understanding, the novel is predicated and structured around an intently subjective first-person narration, the story being filtered through Don Diego of Zama’s perception and in which it is possible to become lost in the swirling mess of his mind, wasting away as he waits for days.

Martel’s adaptation moves outside of his head, though does not lose any of the tale’s claustrophobia in the process of adaptation. Many scenes take place in cramped and stuffy interiors, and as the initial description of this piece demonstrates, there’s no easy way out even if you step outside. Zama longs to return to his family, but it may already be too late, his station appears purgatorial by design. Cramped interiors seem him attempt to adjust and fit in with his surroundings to little success, while the lush, expansive exteriors swallow him whole.

Of course, the native people are far more trapped, in bondage, than he will ever feel. Before the film’s title card, he meets with some of his fellow conquistadors and encounters a man of colour in the process, stuck in leather straps and apparently unwilling to confess. To what is not revealed nor does it seem to matter to his oppressors, it might ultimately be because he is a person of colour.

This is an anti-colonial tale where the indigenous people are often kept to the edges of the frame or the background, yet this is not negligence on Martel’s part. Instead, she slyly subverts a cinematic form, an aesthetic that could otherwise be indebted to colonialism by never forgetting about them, and as such, never letting us forget where they are.

When this man is released from the straps, he immediately darts off-screen and crashes into something before he can get outside. Part of Martel’s style concerns an exquisite and textured soundscape, and so even when he gets lost from the field of vision, his position is known to the audience. In other instances, groups of indigenous people watch their colonisers as much as Zama and the rest of the Spanish watch them –– the first word spoken in the film is “voyeur”. Their presence is constant and this sensorial approach to sound design only supports their existence. During one conversation, the sound of fanning is ever-present, impossible to ignore and so impossible to forget who is forced to do the job.

Equally entwined with this in Martel’s filmic grammar is how Don Diego de Zama is initially presented, standing tall, only to be belittled, mocked and met with disappointment at every turn. Of course, he deserves everything he gets, for he opted to take this position as active oppressor of a marginalised people. Through each roadblock he faces in terms of sexual advances, the tasks pertaining to his job and desire to return to his family, the toll of colonialism is fully showcased. Its effects are both physical and mental, the man gets rebuffed constantly and has to accept it each time. Eventually he falls heavily ill, and for someone who attempted to stand in such a prominent manner at the start, he now withers away into nothingness over the course of the film. A further blow is how Martel delights in shrinking his presence in the frame over the course of his quixotic quest, and while he may occupy the centre of the frame, the greenery appears to be pulling him into its grasp.

Played by Daniel Giménez Cacho with a sure sense of aggravation, he also ensures that the character warrants no sympathy for his plight. He commits an act of violence early on, slapping an indigenous woman, though it plays out facing away from the camera. Still, it’s easy to imagine the disgust on his face with which he looks at her. Zama’s status might imply he is of nobility, but he can be savage and spiteful without second thought and never seems to show remorse after the act. Take a look at his eyes though over the course of the film, as his gaze starts to shift towards a thousand-yard stare, the true extent of this purgatory ever so gradually setting in.

Detached from the narration of the novel, there’s (rightfully) no way to be aligned with such a reprehensible figure, but it’s through her nimble dexterity of cinematic form that Martel manages to turn the audience against him so quickly. The audience very much watches as the film plays out –– as much a set of voyeurs as everyone who observes within the diegesis of the film –– having been given enough distance, enough remove, to find his misfortune funny. While simultaneously, never so far away that they can become capable of turning a blind eye, never given an opportunity to forget the atrocities perpetuated against the native Paraguayans and everyone else subjected to colonial rule.

In its final sequences, a result of a third act shift, both Zama and Zama find themselves removed from the location in which the previous two acts have been dominated by. The latter has joined a party in search of a notorious criminal, the name of whom has been spoken like a whisper, a rumour in the previous acts. This only leads to furthering suffering for Zama, and the film sees this through to the very end, concluding in a swamp; or La Ciénaga.

Speaking with Little White Lies for their latest issue, Martel stated that “The present is what is left of our past” and thus, for all the jokes about how this can mark the start point of the Lucrecia Martel Cinematic Universe, there’s no better evidence to support her statement than how easy it is to see how what’s on in display in her latest work, the crowning achievement of her already impressive filmography, constitutes the foundation for how the unconcerned middle-class of her prior features lives.