Zama opens on an official who cannot make officialdom work for him. Don Diego de Zama, a Spanish Crown officer stationed in a remote eighteenth-century outpost, wants a transfer. Lucrecia Martel makes that wish recur until it loses the dignity of a career ambition and becomes an exposure of colonial power’s absurd dependency. He represents an empire, yet he cannot command time, distance, weather, desire or the people whose labor makes his rank possible.
Martel’s 2017 adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto’s novel refuses the clean lines of the historical epic. The riverbank, offices, courtyards and rooms are crowded with sounds, animals, bodies and interruptions. Zama wants the world to organize itself around his written requests. The film keeps returning him to a more basic condition: waiting among people he has been trained not to recognize as his equals.
That reversal is not a simple humiliation comedy. Daniel Giménez Cacho plays Zama as a man who has internalized status so fully that delay feels like a violation of nature. His frustration spills into every interaction, including those with women, Indigenous people and enslaved people whose lives the colonial administration has already placed under unequal pressure. Martel never permits his frustration to become the film’s only moral horizon. The camera’s attention is wider than his.
Argentine and Latin American historical cinema often must decide whether colonialism will be framed as a past event, a backdrop, or a set of continuing habits. Zama chooses habit. Its officials talk, file, posture and wait; their language turns domination into administration. The fact that the machinery appears dysfunctional does not make it harmless. Its disorder is one way violence becomes difficult to name and easy to distribute.
The administration's vocabulary keeps turning domination into procedure. A governor can assign Zama another task, a letter can be promised, a rank can be invoked; none of those acts requires the office to face the unequal lives surrounding it. The absurdity of a clerk who cannot get what he wants should not make the Crown's authority seem harmless. His delay is backed by a system that can impose far longer delays on others. Martel's crowded sound and interrupted movement keep that imbalance from disappearing behind the officer's self-pity.
The film’s strange comedy is therefore essential. Zama’s dignity is constantly punctured by the material world he expects to rule. Martel does not replace empire with a reassuring counter-myth. She makes its representative look small, needy and lost while keeping the unequal world around him in view. Zama turns delay into a political form. Every postponed transfer reveals how much authority depends on someone else being made to wait longer.