For more than an hour of screentime, Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) languishes as a provincial magistrate in the hot, claustrophobic, and contentious outskirts of eighteenth-century Spain's South American colonies. His desire to be transferred elsewhere perpetually butts up against the baroque mechanations of the regional bureaucracy, whose dependence upon all-too-human whims and material exploitation is laid bare in an era without any technocratic veneer. And the horny Zama's sexual appetite is even less satisfied: he's caught peeping and called a voyeur by native women on a beach, tantalized but kept at a distance by young women who sneak other lovers behind their sanctimonious father's back, and strung along for (non-sexual) favors by the elegant Luciana (Lola Dueñas) whose mature flirtation turns out to be a bow without an arrow. We eventually learn that he has a half-Indian son with whom he has only fleeting contact: whatever might actually root Zama to his surrounding environment is rejected in favor of maddening whispers, teases that can barely be called dreams let alone promises. Eventually, he will escape from this oppressive if placid cage, long past the point where it might actually be a liberation and with results that suggest it never could be anyway.
