Review: Viola (2012)
Identities flow freely among actresses in a production of "Twelvth Night" and a bike messenger
Viola (2012)
Written and directed by Matías Piñeiro
I’ve been on an New Argentine Cinema kick lately following this summer’s release of Laura Citarella’s “Trenque Lauquen” and this fall’s “Los Delinquentes” (“The Delinquents”), both of which are films that offer alternative narrative strategies, generally undermining and thwarting viewers’ attempts to impose simple explanations on the mysteries they contain. As I’ve researched these films, looking at interviews, reviews and essays in film journals and newspapers, I’ve come across a group of actors whose appearance in a film, regardless of the director, promises that something weird and wonderful will happen on screen.
That’s what pointed me to “Viola” and the work of writer-director Matías Piñeiro, who is fascinated with Shakespeare texts and interactions between the actors who are performing them, and between their friends and acquaintances. I’ll be watching and reacting to several of his films over the next few days.
First up is “Viola” (2012), in which actresses performing an all-female “Twelfth Night” — or a cut-up version of it — flow into and out of the life of a woman (the titular Viola, played by María Villar) who is a partner with her boyfriend in a business called Metropólis. (It’s unclear just what they do, but one of her primary roles is to deliver CDs or DVDs to their clients on a bicycle, in packages marked with a blood-red M that resembles the M scrawled on Peter Lorre’s back in the film “M.” Riding around Buenos Aires on these errands, she coincidentally encounters the play’s performers or their acquaintances in various locales.
That’s about as close as I can come to describing the movie’s narrative content, except to say that some of it occurs during a dream as she falls asleep in someone’s car. In fact, the whole script contains dreamlike logic with respect to events. In one scene, two of the “Twelfth Night” actresses begin running lines from Act I, Scene 5, in which Viola — a shipwrecked noblewoman who has disguised herself as a man to enter the service of Count Orsino — beguiles Orsino’s intended, Olivia. But rather than going through the scene from beginning to end, the two actresses repeat a section of the dialogue over and over again, in smaller and smaller chunks — it’s like the text is rising in a gyre and evaporating a little with every rotation. As this happens, the two actors approach closer and closer, and when the text completely evaporates, the actress playing Olivia smooches the other.
Well, that’s not in Shakespeare’s play. And whether the kiss is in the work they’re rehearsing is unclear. We see the same two characters a little later, and they don’t show any passion, so maybe it’s something they’ve acted many times already — except that the play’s director narrates the action that follows. And he’s talking to the Viola who is delivering packages for Metropólis.
“And after the kiss,” he says, “she realizes that she has to run. She hurries because she knows her boyfriend’s coming soon. She walks the other way that she expects he’ll be coming. She even walks three bus stops farther than usual…” Clearly this is not “Twelfth Night” anymore.
These similar names — Viola, Olivia — with one of the Violas a character in the Shakespeare play and the real one delivering packages— suggest that writer-director Piñeiro is enthusiastically adopting the Bard’s own tropes of play-within-a-play and confused identities. (The IMDB page for the film seems to be doing the latter as well, as every single photo it carries of the film, no matter who is shown in the image, is captioned María Villar, who plays Viola — the bicycle one. This didn’t help me identify the actresses who performed the “Twelfth Night” scene, but I feel certain that they are Agustina Muñoz and Elisa Carricajo.)
There really isn’t much of a narrative in this movie. It begins with a backstage scene in which one of the actors breaks up with her boyfriend over the phone, then is the subject of speculation among the rest of the cast when she leaves the dressing room to meet him. At the end of the film, Viola describes, in voice over, how she and her own boyfriend go to see this adaptation of “Twelfth Night” and it leads to him falling in love with one of the actresses. The only straight line leading through the film is the titular Viola herself, having encountered all the other characters on a delivery run.
So don’t expect a traditional narrative. The movie is more focused on the moment-by-moment interactions between characters. Despite the lack of story, I was fascinated by the movie and couldn’t wait for what came next — partly because I was hoping for a clearer plot line but also because the acting is so exquisite.
This is not a film from the El Pampero collective, but it shares the undermined narrative typical of their films, as well as a number of actors who appear in them. IMDB listings show that Piñeiro continues these strategies in his next films, so stay tuned for reviews of those.
“Viola” and Piñeiro’s other films are available for watching on Mubi.