When I arrive to meet the Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel in the bar of a posh London hotel, she’s wandered off to have a smoke. I find her on the terrace puffing away on a cigar as thick as a baby’s wrist, trademark cat’s-eye glasses perched on her head. She could pass for a character in a Wes Anderson movie – the intense, intellectual arthouse filmmaker. And she talks the part, too, speaking in long twisty paragraphs that, like a stopped clock giving the correct time twice a day, occasionally answer my questions – and frequently seem to baffle her translator.
No one could accuse Martel of selling out. In her early 50s, she’s made just four films. The first three were family dramas set in the city of Salta in the north-west of Argentina where she grew up in a solidly middle-class family: La Ciénaga (The Swamp), Holy Girl and The Headless Woman, in which a middle-aged dentist involved in a hit-and-run accident is uncertain whether she’s hit a dog or a child. To her fans, Martel is arthouse heaven (she’s been called the Terrence Malick of Latin American cinema). To her critics, her work is the definition of “arthouse endurance test”: frustratingly inaccessible, aimless and reach-for-the-remote slow.
Martel’s new film, Zama, is her first in nearly a decade, a feverish satire of colonial hubris with a delicious streak of absurdist humour. Based on a 1956 novel about an 18th-century colonial administrator, it stars Daniel Giménez Cacho as the eponymous Zama, a weak man of little importance desperate to leave his backwater post in Paraguay (and constantly scratching at his sweaty periwig). The film is being hailed as Martel’s big comeback, which she finds hilarious. “It’s a nice idea that someone is out there desperately waiting for me to make a film, but I don’t think they are.” Actually, she can’t understand how directors bang out a film every year or two. “How is that possible? Do they really have so many ideas? Do they really have so much to share with the world? I don’t,” she says with a sly, cat-like smile.
So, what has Martel been up to for the past 10 years? Well for about 18 months, she tells me, she threw herself into writing a sci-fi script based on a popular Argentinian comic book. In a depressed funk when that project collapsed – “There was a mutual lack of trust between director and producer” – she blew $16,000 on a boat and sailed up the Paraná river with two female friends and a box of books: “When you say boat, people think yacht, but it was a small thing with no fridge and a tiny motor.” One of those books was Zama; it took her four years to finish the script, and she shot her film in 2015.
What happened to the boat? “I sold it,” she answers, with an expression of mock grief. “We had to spend the money on the movie. And I needed money to live.”
Since we spoke last October during the London film festival, she has revealed that in 2016 she paused editing on Zama for cancer treatment and is in remission.
Martel has always been fascinated and appalled by the arrogance and entitlement of Argentina’s middle class. It’s a theme that runs through all her films, in which Argentines of European descent tend to treat indigenous people as second-class citizens. For Martel, discrimination and class divisions in Argentina are a direct result of the Europeans arriving, and it shocks her when others don’t see it. “Even very educated people, they can’t make the link. It’s almost like looking at a wooden boat and not realising that it was made from trees. We see the wooden boat, but not the trees.” Her job as an artist is to wake everyone up.
Zama explores colonialism and racism more explicitly than her other films. As well as portraying the rot at the heart of the colonial interlopers, she wanted to show indigenous Latin Americans and African slaves as “not so conquered” or submissive, as people in their own right. Marginal characters in the story, they take up a lot of space, crowding scenes set indoors. Martel will frame a scene so that you find your eyes constantly straying away from the main action to a slave swaying a giant fan or walking across a room – far more interesting than ridiculous Zama in his ill-fitting wig.
Martel is not a household name, but she does have cult status on the festival circuit; she’s one of the few women to have shown in competition at Cannes (a measly 4.3% of films in the festival’s competition history have been directed by women). But still, I wonder if she has struggled with sexism in Argentina as a female director? Martel shrugs. “If you’re a woman, you’re white, you’re middle class, things won’t be easy for you. But compare that to people in the same country who are poor, dark-skinned. I don’t want to talk about my difficulties because they’re just nothing.” Her next film is a documentary she’s been working on for a nearly a decade about an indigenous activist killed in a land dispute.
Zama was ineligible for Cannes last year because one of its producers, Pedro Almodóvar, was on the jury. But Argentina submitted it as the country’s entry for best foreign language film at the Oscars (it didn’t make the shortlist). Martel clearly finds herself at odds with Hollywood culture. She pulls a face when I mention the Oscars race. “It’s a joke,” she says in English, then corrects herself, adding politely. ‘The people who vote are actors and technicians, so that’s an honour, but … ” But awards aren’t exactly important to her sense of validation as a filmmaker? She gives a small wry smile. “No. It’s like a when a millionaire invites you around his house for dinner. You stay for dinner but it’s not like you’re going to move into his house.”
• Zama is released on 25 May
