Opiniões dos críticos

Tracing out this series of wrinkles, disruptions and conflicts which emerge from a simple staging of a 425-year-old play, Piñeiro taps into the spirit of the text by regarding it as a living work, a commentary on the sort of universal human shortcomings that plague us to this day.

Piñeiro's performers perform—they all have deft ways with dialogue and their gestures are brisk, precise, controlled—yet he films them in ways that prove what only the cinema can do. His roving, probing long takes film durations themselves—the interstices of dialogue, the spaces between people, the gaps illuminated by the spark of gazes and caresses, the moments of great change that take place while nothing seems to be happening.

In Matías Piñeiro's elating The Princess of France, the precise attachments, romantic or otherwise, among the constellation of characters may be deliberately confusing, but the performers themselves, all part of the writer-director's regular troupe, are exceptionally vivid.

Piñeiro delights just as much in the erotics of the voice: few directors take so much tangible pleasure in the sheer sound of voices speaking, even (especially) if they're simply repeating the same words over and over. And the relaxed exuberance of his young cast is such that their voices are equally natural, equally vivid whether they're speaking everyday demotic or translated Shakespeare.

What is clear, both from the way Piñeiro works around these references and from his generous handling of the cast, is his affection for his material, which takes on a charm of its own. In an era in which the big movies are bigger and more expensive than they've ever been, few acts of resistance seem more meaningful than making a small, careful, and personal film that still wants nothing more than to invite the viewer into its private world.

It's as if someone dared Piñeiro to make a Shakespeare-based film that signifies nothing without evincing any sound or fury at all. That's not to say this is a tale told by an idiot—Piñeiro is clearly very intelligent, and trying to do something unique. So far, however, he's made a series of trifles (this film, mercifully, runs only a little over an hour, as did Viola) that admire everyone and challenge no one.

This is a film that demands several viewings in order to better understand its complex depiction of performance, deception, and language. And even if the game proves not to be worth the candle, there's always Princess of France's small-scale pleasures—a painting sensuously studied by Piñeiro's camera, a perfectly blocked pas de deux between Victor and a lover—to which one can continually, happily return.

It is in his systematic way of treating the characters that repetition comes alive more than ever in this particular film of Piñeiro's. As the variations progress, the film becomes more and more confusing, but in an endearing way. We get to know the characters through these repetitions of speech, scenes, sequences and dreams.

The film opens with one of the most beguiling images in recent cinema: with Schubert playing on the soundtrack, a camera pans over a patch of nocturnal Buenos Aires before resting on a football court... We watch a game take place in which, periodically, a player from one team will leave the frame and return in the uniform of their opponents. Although this image has little overt connection with the rest of the film, it acts as a graphic primer for the vacillations of the narrative to come.

The film opens with a stunning, high-angle shot of an amateur football match that, had it been screened as a stand-alone short film, would have been a highlight of the fest. The rest of The Princess of France, however, fails to maintain the same formal and aesthetic heights.

Despite this seemingly soap-opera plot – at times, it seems an Argentinian and high-art Girls, with attractive hipsters' hand-wringing over underemployed paramours – the film manages to self-reflexively investigate how confused viewers can become with a large cast of personae and how controlled narrative has to operate in distinguishing and manipulating characters.

Parsing the The Princess of France is difficult, but not because Piñero is trying to throw or chasten his audience. He's moving around within his own frame of reference, and even when that's a faraway place—how many of us have read Love's Labor's Lost lately?—he always makes like Puck and extends a friendly hand in the form of a beautiful composition or an innovative editing maneuver.