Back in 2015, Calgary Cinematheque ran a New Argentinean Cinema series—still the hottest of hot topics, if we may say so ourselves!—in which Matías Piñeiro’s third and breakout feature Viola (2012) was presented alongside works directed by Lucrecia Martel, Lisandro Alonso, and Carlos Sorín. Originally debuting officially at the Toronto International Film Festival when its director was a mere thirty years of age, Viola(2012) astonished and doubtlessly retains its capacity to do so most especially because of the finely-tune or especially honed nature of its formally rigorous and highly individual approach, a matter that many uninitiated viewers will quickly determine has a little less to do with a brilliant young director in command of the nuances of film grammar than it does a group of friends and/or collaborators figuring out how to make a new kind of energetic, relatively-emancipated cinema together. It is not for nothing that 2016’s Hermia & Helena is dedicated to Setsuko Hara, the actress who made six films with Japanese filmmaker Yasujirō Ozu between 1949 and 1961.

Though it is very a much a narrative film that commands the attention and even fascinates, Viola (2012) isn’t so much telling the story of a group of young and very attractive actors rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night as it is dropping in on them and hovering around as they rehearse the Bard and get up to sundry dalliances both romantic and professional/artistic, all this business becoming increasingly, tantalizingly enmeshed in the episodic unfolding (or ‘the telling’). The company of actors is filmed up close and with short lenses; the takes are very often long and fluid tracks of the actors and actresses as they thrust and parry, always a little more murderous than their good graces may tend to indicate. You may recall that Shakespeare’s comedy is replete with “gender-bending” and something close to Elizabethan sex-positivity. (Yes, this is an oxymoron.) In the world of Twelfth Night, boys pretend to be girls and girls pretend to be boys primarily as means to hoodwink some particular party and regain what they believe is rightfully theirs. There is love and tenderness and right-minded desire, but there is also lots of calculation and tricks and people with time on their hands up to nasty mischief. It’s how the world works! In his three features subsequent to Viola (2012), Piñeiro has returned to Shakespeare’s comedies—which are sex comedies, pure and simple—and to his own stock company, centrally prizing always above all else the three principle actresses, Agustina Muñoz, María Villar, and Romina Paula, the first two of whom once again take slightly-wobbly centre stage in Isabella(2020), this impossible-not-to-love team’s latest and most arresting triumph.

As manifestations of a group methodology that drops in, hovers, lingers, and semi-obsessively recirculates, the dancing, flirty, and very often nervously-dissimulating films of Piñeiro & Co. have found a form that totally suits the stories and the behaviour of the ambitious much-more-than-averagely-gifted young people these stories cannot operate without. As such, it probably shouldn’t be surprising that as director, Piñeiro’s great gift is clearly for mise-en-scène, which we might risk being slightly reductive by saying is French for the things and people in the ‘frame’ and how the 'frame’ relates to them. Complicating matters: we all know that time also has timeframes and that carpenters make frames when they build spaces. Is all this business also related to mise-en-scène? Well, it is unmistakably so in the films directed thus far by Matías Piñeiro! It may be perfectly emblematic also of a 21st century both hyperconnected and absolutely dislocated.

Revisiting Viola(2012), we note that the mise-en-scène is realized at its fullest in something like a co-choreography or co-co-choreography of all the interdependent elements, binding like protons or bouncing like electrons. Because of the nature of the activities of the young artists who are the central concern of these films, the lives of the characters are bound only provisionally to lovers and collaborators, these the sort of ventures that seem always fraught and normally confusing. In each subsequent film, the lives and concerns are variations on the same work and play, exploring limits and bolstering assets, but the form of each film has been modified very specifically, to an extent that the films themselves end up commenting on the phenomenon. Both The Princess of France (2014) and its immediate follow-up, Hermia & Helena (2016), begin with extemporaneous courtyard soccer matches espied from the position of a roof or residential balcony, though the earlier sequence is accompanied by the first movement of Schumann’s debut symphony and the later one by an extremely familiar factory-setting iPhone ringtone. The world of actresses consistently boarders romantically and professionally on the world of musicians and radio broadcasting, such that within the films, the technical machines that record and disseminate either images or sounds become active instrumental elements within the ‘frame.’ The individual films by Piñeiro & Co. become successive efforts to frame differently. They become about ‘habits of seeing’ but also become their own habitats of seeing; it is on this level that Isabella(2020) achieves its special exalted status, we argue, especially as its incorporation of standalone patches of morphing colour, both psychedelic and narcotic, as well as its superimpositions and elegant palimpsest of frames within frames, seem to indicate a real effort to articulate how the relationship(s) we have with manufactured images and sounds has changed fundamentally during a period of pandemic and lockdown.

Surely there may be some kind of glory in the ceremonial restaging of our intimate mishaps as little groups or cells of romantic misfits! There may also be immediately available methods or stratagems, proven or not, for any one of us at any given time to establish some kind of sustainable locally-global harmonic in love and work. This might be what it means at this very moment to properly inhabit.

Written by Jason Wierzba.

Habits and Habitats: On Matías Piñeiro & Co.’s Isabella (2020)

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