Viola

Viola uses Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night as a starting point to pursue its own comedy about the erroneous zones of Eros. 

In the play twins Viola and Sebastien are separated by a shipwreck. To survive Viola disguises herself as a boy named Bassanio and finds work with Duke Orsino, with whom she falls in love. He dispatches him/her to deliver his love message to Olivia, who rejects Orsino altogether. Instead Olivia falls in love with “Bassanio.” After much entanglement and paradox  Sebastian returns, so Viola gets Orsino and Olivia Sebastian, the male twin of “Bassanio.” The comedy gains piquancy from the fact that Shakespeare’s theatre used boys to play women. So Orsino sends a boy dressed as a girl dressed as a boy to court the boy dressed as Olivia, and she falls in love with the boy who’s a girl played by a boy. She settles on a different boy who’s really the same boy as came to her playing a girl dressed as a boy. Still with me?

Matias Pinero elaborates on Shakespeare’s playing on being and performing, life and art. The film seems entirely focused on the performers’ faces. The closeups are so tight and pervasive that we focus entirely on the characters to the exclusion of their space.There’s no sign this is Buenos Aires and we get very little sense of the rooms beyond the character’s present space. The functional “interiors” are what we infer from the characters. Odd for a play about rehearsing a play, there is no shot of a stage. This film takes as its arena the face, in which self and pretence roil in confusion.

      The title combines theatre and life. The eponymous Viola operates in the film’s plot reality, not as the play’s Viola. She takes over the second half, playing a courier of pirated CDs/DVDs. As a courier delivering art/messages she echoes the play’s Viola but declares herself wholly free of artistic abilities and interest. That denial of artistry is merely artfulness. In the car scene she does a creditable recitation of the play’s Epilogue — which wins her an informal audition to replace a departing cast member. In the last scene she denies any musical ability but the film ends on a long musical number in which she sings, albeit with more charm than beauty. From the title to the plot Viola personifies the interdependence of art and life. That’s why, as one woman observes, everything comes so easily to Viola. 

That’s the point of the earlier scene in which one actress seduces another actress through their repeated repetition of a scene between Olivia and “Bassanio”/”Viola.” We watch the power of poetry bring women into an unexpected intimacy. Art overpowers life. 

The film’s young actress is given a different motive than the play’s for the courtship of Olivia. Shakespeare has Olivia fall for Bassanio/Viola naturally, which prepares for her pairing with Sebastian. Here the actress playing Viola declares her intention to make the actress playing Olivia fall in love with her so that she will return to her abandoned lover, whom we heard her coldly dumping on the phone in the first scene. Before we meet Viola’s partner/lover Agostin, Sabrina (who plays Olivia) describes him as a disconcertingly obsessed viewer in the audience. At the end of the film he is leaving Viola to pursue Sabrina.

This game of musical beds plays against the characters’ earnest theorizing about what love is and how it works. One woman could not love someone who did not love her. Of course, this runs contrary to the Shakespeare model and to the tangle of fleeting passions the film unwinds. Like the play the film exuberantly celebrates the transcendence of the irrational when we open our hearts to another.              This is a quiet, subtle film. I certainly need a second viewing especially for its dense though casual reams of conversation and an obviously textually significant song at the end, untranslated in the present print.