VIOLA
Dir. Matías Piñeiro, Edited by Alejo Moguillansky, 2012
Argentina, 60 minutes
In Spanish with English Subtitle

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3 - 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 8 - 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11 - 11:59 PM
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 19 - 7:30 PM

The second film in Piñeiro’s ongoing Shakespeare series takes an abstracted, dreamlike approach to desire and romantic entanglement. Piñeiro regular Agustina Muñoz plays Cecilia, an actress playing Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night who hatches a plan to seduce the actress playing Olivia, Sabrina (Elisa Carricajo) so that she can prove her own theories around desire and romance. Meanwhile Viola (María Villar, Piñeiro’s other leading regular) bikes around Buenos Aires delivering packages of pirated DVDS to various men who each have an ambiguous attraction to her. How these two Violas are related is never elaborated yet chance and the inexplicable flow of Piñeiro’s wavy narrative weave them together in an elegiac riff on longing and seduction.

“\[A\] sensation of pleasant confusion recurs throughout Viola, which might be described as an ensemble romantic comedy but at the same time doesn’t seem beholden to any genre. Argentinean director Matías Piñeiro’s sophomore feature dares to disorient its audience from the first scene onward. But it’s not an obtuse film. Although it is filled with mysteries, it is not asking to be decoded. Instead, Viola invites us to submit to its pleasures, which are ample and ultimately very simple. In lieu of stylistic fireworks or some sort of grand thesis statement, Piñeiro offers us nothing less than a window on extreme beauty, which radiates through the faces of his actresses and the Shakespeare plays that they intermittently recite in a variety of contexts: as dialogue in stage productions, as lines being rehearsed in private, and as words interpolated into everyday conversation.” - Adam Nayman, Reverse Shot