IN REHEARSAL
an essay by leo goldsmith Matías Piñeiros The Princess of France is about more than one form of playboth in front of and behind the cameraand this short prologue is just the first hint. Its cast of characters, with all their sportive liaisons and romantic machinations, form a circuitous network of boyfriends and girlfriends and lovers and exes, but the film holds plenty of tricks up its sleeve as well. Just as Lorena enters the scene in medias res, we too seem to arrive perpetually in the midst of things, only to watch as they unfold, repeat, and double back. And these games take us, like Lorena, into and out of the theater. The cinema has always held the theater at a curious distance: sometimes invoked with a note of disapprovalone can refer disapprovingly to a movies excessive staginess, or disparage it as a work of mere filmed theaterbut at other times set aside as a privileged space between the real and the imaginary. In Bergmans Fanny and Alexander (1982), the theater serves as a little world, a shelter from the chaos and cruelty of the bigger one outside. But if Bergman finds in his little world a certain measure of control, Piñeiros films find perhaps the opposite: something much more generative, reactive, and even a little beyond the filmmakers control. There, the theater is less a shelter than a way of being: as As You Like Its Jaques has it, all the worlds a stage, and the theaters sense of play and imagination is somehow everywhere at once, remade constantly in the streets and bedrooms and museums and courtyards and recording studios of Buenos Aires. In Piñeiros last two films, this has been most readily suggested by the enlisting of Shakespearean comedies as intertexts: As You Like It in Rosalinda (2010), and Twelfth Night in Viola (2012). For The Princess of France, the play in question is Loves Labours Lost, and its a curious one, too. At once linguistically dense and narratively thin, this is a work of theater that seems unusually preoccupied with its status as a work of theater, with characters who enact not one but two masquerades of their own, alongside all of the usual Shakespearean dissembling and double-crossing. Of course, as usual, Piñeiros film does not so much adapt the play as metabolize it, diffusing its efflorescence of romantic verbiage and themes of thwarted male desire among the characters here in ways that scramble the already complex female-male volleying of Shakespeares plays. Víctor (Julián Larquier), an actor who leads this troupe of players and seems to date most of them, might correspond to one of the plays many flighty, overzealous suitors, or he might well be the aloof and unapproachable Princess of France herselfa role he once played, before passing it along to his friend, Guillermo (Pablo Sigal), who may or may not be secretly dating Víctors girlfriend Paula (Agustina Muñoz). All becomes a bit more complicated when, suddenly returned from a year in Mexico, Víctor tries to reconvene his troupe of collaboratorsfriends and girlfriends and lovers and exes aliketo record the play for radio. These rehearsals and recording sessions form a kind of overtone to the drama, as dialogues repeat and recirculate, sometimes aligning, sometimes not, with the characters own wayward impulses. In this way, the small mysteries and deceptions of sound recording are given particular emphasis here, as radio, sound effects, and voiceover narration each suggest little parallel universes alongside the films action. Sound recording also offers the chance for loops and repetitions, and there are many instances of these in the text of Loves Labours Lost already, as there are in all of Piñeiros Shakespeare films: characters repeat lines or echo one another or are trapped in little circular patterns like broken records. Here, these little repetitions can function as a kind of penance, or offer a sour memory the opportunity for a do-over, or even realize different possibilities for the direction of the story. In these films, rehearsal is not just a means to an end, but a way of living, its patterns of recurrence extending into everyday actions: like the montagealmost a supercutof two lovers kissing, or the three variations on one scene, each with very different sets of results. All of this helps to enlist the audience not as passive observers, but as willing participants, team players. Piñeiro has said that he likes to think of the spectator as an accomplice, one who helps put together and rearrange the many parallel lines of his films, and this sense of conspiracy seems to account for the unique pleasures of watching his work. Indeed, this collusion extends throughout the films, enveloping Piñeiros regular coterie of onscreen players, and even guiding the deceptively insouciant camera of regular cinematographer Fernando Lockett, who is able to harness whole lengthy scenes in languorous, panning single-takes. Even with all its asynchronies and misalignments, its subtle feints and dodges, theres always a reassuring sense in Piñeiros films that all will be right againthat, as in all of Shakespeares comedies, the balance will be righted. ------- Leo Goldsmith is a writer and curator based in New York. He is the co-editor of the film section of The Brooklyn Rail, and a PhD Candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. blog comments powered by Disqus |