The Shakespeare game

Young Argentinian filmmaker Matías Piñeiro is fond of stories with multiple young women and plots in which events in a Shakespeare play and everyday cast interact. This is his third; the first was Rosalinda. In The Princess of France, his typically short fifth feature, he continues to work the same themes and gestures with proto-auteurist intensity (and even greater repetitiveness). Alas, the "jolt" I spoke of in reviewing his last film, Viola (ND/NF 2013), hasn't come -- that a writing fellowship at NYU might jar him out of his hermetic, self-indulgent -- if unquestionably smart and internally consistent -- world; that he would stop being (as Mike D'Angelo put it speaking of Viola) "content to merely float a few intriguing ideas rather than diligently follow through on any aspect in particular"; that he might produce something with appeal outside the cozy limits of festival admiration.

Alas, this doesn't appear to have happened. If anything The Princess of France may be even harder to follow and to like than Viola. It revolves around Victor (Julián Larquier Tellarini), a young director (he still looks pimply, and his deep voice sounds like it recently changed) who comes back to Buenos Aires after a year away following his father's death and some time in Mexico. A bevy of young woman, conveniently all actresses, are both linked with Victor through theater work and personally interested in him; and there's one poor underused male actor, and perhaps rival for the women, Guillermo (Pablo Sigal). Given Victor's very unappealing looks, it's puzzling how fascinating all the women find him, and how often they let him kiss them on the mouth. Bu then they, members of Piñeiro's regular company of players, are no great beauties themselves. Anyway meet Victor's girlfriend Paula (Agustina Muñoz), who's pledged to be loyal; his sometime lover Ana (María Villar), who's not convinced he loves her; his ex, Natalia (Romina Paula), who thinks he still loves her; his friend Lorena (Laura Paredes), who hopes he will come back to her; and newly hired Carla (Elisa Carricajo), a complete stranger who might be his real next love. Victor has gotten a commission to do a radio version of Love's Labor Lost. Everyone is involved.

The dialogue is loud and rapid-fire, particularly when Victor is on screen, which is mostly. Piñeiro likes several things going on at once, as when in this film and Viola, the line between the action in a Shakespeare play and the interaction of the players is blurred. The film begins with a loud rendition of a composition by Felix Mendelssohn while we are made to watch a football match on a cement court from high above, so it looks like a diagram or a computer game. Piñeiro is also fond of alternate takes, where, for instance, Victor and one of the women treat each other quite differently the second time than they did in the first. He also provides a short alternate ending, in which Victor tells a woman "I love you," and they have a long kiss. This kind of thing can be amusing in the right context, but it can also make one think the filmmaker is only playing with his characters, and with us.

The repetitions can simply seem annoying and pointless, as when Victor has his only male actor for the radio play repeat the same short passage of Shakespeare (translated into Spanish, of course, and read with an Argentinian accent) five times, and each reading sounds exactly the same as the last. And the extremely verbose rapid-fire dialogue, requiring non-Spanish speakers to spend most of their time struggling to keep up with the subtitles, many of them translating Spanish translations of Shakespeare back into English, adds to the challenge but not to the pleasure. An oddity in the radio play, fruit no doubt of the director's tendency to work from a small casting pool, is that the women's voices all sound rather alike.

Piñeiro is enormously clever and academy-friendly: the scenes are readymade for film students armed with DVDs to pour over and write analyses of. But his work seems increasingly repetitious -- overall, as well as in part -- and ultimately cold. It begins to feel mechanical, self-satisfied, and unappealing. The reward is puzzlement rather than delight. This is not very solid stuff; Piñeiro provides themes, echoes, and tropes, but his plot line is a will-o-the-wisp. Yet this is also material that, with a few alterations, in the hands of a director with a gift for comedy like Frank Capra or George Cukor could be light, charming and accessible. It doesn't look like that's going to happen with this filmmaker, however.

The Princess of France/La Princessa de Francia, 70 mins., debuted at Locarno and has played or is scheduled for Rio, Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago, and it was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival where it plays on 5 and 6 October 2014. Cast list. Dp: Fernando Lockett.

(For my full coverage of the 2014 NYFF see also FILMLEAF.)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.