Argentinean director Matías Piñeiro returns once again to his very special adaptation-revision of female roles in Shakespeare’s comedies. This is the fourth, after Rosalinda (2010), Viola (2012) and La Princesa de Francia (2014). The novelty this time is that Piñeiro abandons the world of Buenos Aires and sets his story and characters – his troupe of fetish actresses, headed by Agustina Muñoz and María Villar – in New York. Camila, a young Argentinean theater director arrives in Manhattan from Buenos Aires, for an artist in residence stint, and to stage her new project: a Spanish translation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. But when she gets to her new city, she realizes that the absence of her friends and partner are too much to bear and that her work as a translator does not make up for such a loss.
Never, in Piñeiro’s cinema has any adaptation ever been so literal: it’s not about reciting in English, or suitably dressing up his actresses. The “echo” lies in the vital, love tangles of the characters, in the quick, sharp replies and retorts, in the structure of the film understood as a game, in the freedom of movement and narration of everything unfolding on screen. Wrapped up in a little postcard-type mystery, Camila decides to shelve her initial plans and give herself over to an existential va-et-vient fraught with love tangles, dead-ends, small dramas and lots of starting-over-again.
There is another echo which is not to be slighted, that has direct bearing on Piñeiro: our director left Buenos Aires a few years ago to settle in New York. This film is perhaps his response to that life far away, that double life (with Buenos Aires always present in the flashbacks) to that modern life, of melancholy, in big cities.
So if this film by Piñeiro is indeed a contemporary adaptation of Midsummer Night’s Dream, what would happen if we decided to project it alongside the first ever film adaptation of this Shakespeare classic? Can such a double screening explain a good deal of the history of cinema? We shall do so as a kind of game, homage and prologue to the Season we are preparing for this summer in conjunction with the Fundación Cristina Enea: in July, we shall screen, in the park, at night, in the open, four different adaptations (1935, 1955, 1968, 1982), done over the years of this classic by Shakespeare.
Screening of the last film by Matías Piñeiro, 'Hermia & Helena' a contemporary adaptation of Midsummer Night’s Dream, projected it alongside the first ever film adaptation of this Shakespeare classic.