The Princess of France
La princesa de Francia

Argentinian writer/director Matías Piñeiro makes small, intimate, casual seeming though intricately staged movies, with a stock company of actors and friends based in Buenos Aries. His recent pictures use Shakespearian comedies as inspiration to tell their contemporary stories. They are not modern updates of the classics, but entirely original films that interact with the themes and texts of the Bard’s well-known plays. His short Rosalinda (2010) took its cues from As You Like It. The feature length Viola (2012) followed a narrative influenced by Twelfth Night. In each, the world of the play being rehearsed begins to overlap with the real lives of the modern characters playing the roles.

The Princess of France centers on Víctor (Julián Larquier Tellarini) who, after a time away, returns to Buenos Aires to reassemble the cast of his production of Love’s Labour’s Lost for radio. While he's been gone, his repertoire has been through many couplings and uncouplings, and several mini-dramas--some involving him and others not--that affect the project. As the film progresses we see how the “real life” events parallel and interact with the events of the play they’re reworking.  Unfortunately, the intricacies of these various relational dynamics lack either dramatic intensity or comedic insight. I'm sure my failure to connect with the picture has something to do with a cultural and language barrier (these characters speak faster than even a non-dyslexic can read subtitles). The casualness of sexual and romantic interplay in contemporary Latin cinema can often be baffling to American eyes. I can't understand how viewers can invest in romantic dynamics that seem so banal to the characters, or why we should find humor and meaning in relationships that seem to be as unimportant to them as which girl will play which role in this film's radio drama.