Welcome to my 2026 project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.
Today’s feature is from the year 2017, we are headed to Argentina to attempt to get promoted…
Movie: Zama
Year: 2017
Director: Lucrecia Martel
Country: Argentina
The Elevator Pitch: An officer awaiting a transfer suffers the boomerang effect at mach speed.
How Was the Movie?:
This is a fantastic movie I can basically recommend to almost anyone. We almost watched a different film from the same director, La Cienaga (2001), and now I know we’ll have to go back and watch it after all is said and done because this movie was so good.
Anyway in this movie Don Diego de Zama is a prick of a man made entirely out of entitlement, greed, self-focus, and carelessness and he basically find himself trapped into a Catch-22 that is as much his own making as it is a function of the very sick colonialist society he inhabits. Zama is eaten alive by his own masculinity and his pompousness and the film takes a kind of dizzying pleasure in dolling out each episode of his unspooling in beautiful, cinematic detail.
I think you could probably write a fantastically long paper about all of my favorite still frames in this movie and it would not convey how much I loved the use of color and texture in it. The costumes are especially delightful and impeccable keep fresh with pops of color, mending pock marks, and visible stitching on them. Fabrics and wigs and make up all keep characters as memorable looking as their personalities.
The main character played by Daniel Giménez Cacho is perfectly cast and plays the mad, falling in his own sword Zama with such deftness you almost start to worry for him but for the me the stand out of the film was Lola Dueñas who plays a socialite noblewoman and steals every inch of every scene she is in. The pace of the film is actually quite slow and I think people would argue that “nothing happens” in the film until the last 30 minutes but I actually disagree we get to see at each scene just how and why Zama has screwed himself from every angle and the last 30 minutes are where the movie goes completely off the rails in a good and for me, at least, unforgettable way.
The movie made me pretty keen also to read the book it was based off of which is practically a national treasure of Argentina. The film does a fantastic job of being both of character piece of Zama but also a slice of the damage and havoc caused by Spanish during their conquests of Latin America.
I really enjoyed this and will probably have to re-watch it at some point because it’s such an interesting and dense movie.
What was for Dinner?:
For dinner I made Pollo con Chimichurri. I’m not a hater of chimichurri but I found this just okay. The best part of this meal was that it takes literally minutes to put together. It might have actually taken longer to cook the french fries and sear the zucchini than to actually cook the chicken in the pan. I don’t make a lot of whole seared pieces of chicken so at least it was a fun novelty. I would probably chop the parsley even finer but I guess I was feeling lazy that day. All together this was pretty good and of course I have nothing negative to say about french fries either (my personal favorite food).
I wouldn’t make this exact pan fried recipe again but I might have a sheet pan / oven version of this with a lot of vegetables also. Obviously oil with herbs and spices in it is good on pretty much anything but I still prefer a gremolata to the oil based chimichurri sauce. Your mileage may vary.
That’s it for 2017, see you in the future year of 2018!