115 minute running time but felt much longer and easily could have had 20 minutes cut out of it … I wasn’t thrilled with this, too long and pointless in the end (“the futility of colonialism”). A Spanish official stuck in Paraguay (landlocked, thus the inaccuracy of the opening image of him standing on the seashore) in the 18th century, the idea is sort of interesting, and I did like the scenes where he was surrounded by jabbering natives who just ignored him (I felt like that in China sometimes, “cosmic loneliness”), but this is a movie that critics will like and audiences will hate. You can give it a miss for sure.
Su Zhuoning is the only critic who dared write the truth: “Zama feels more like artfully shot lorem ipsum. You might stumble upon brilliant insights amidst the confusion. The big picture, however, proves elusive.”
The two-l llama, He's a beast.