Opiniões dos críticos

Whereas most filmmakers taking on Shakespeare find inspiration (rightly or wrongly) in his dramas, this modest, sly Argentinean has unlocked the cinematic possibilities of the comedies, reveling in the potential of their artifice to delight and transport us, and even, perhaps, to teach us something, across a span of ages, about living and working in love.

It's misguided to term the movie you're about to watch as "Matías Piñeiro's Viola" or, say, "Viola (Matías Piñeiro, Argentina)" He's the guide of the movie, the writer-director, but he doesn't own it. Once written, he gives it over to his actors, a regular ensemble of supremely gifted players mostly trained in theater, and collectively, they make the movie together. Viola, like everything they've made before, is a group project with no true author. The auteur theory itself is challenged here.

What [a viewer less open to the film's nearly free-associative way of thinking] would be missing is the real substance behind Viola's initially inscrutable array of poetic linkages: the idea that intellectual schemas, logical formulas and habitual modes of interpreting the world are only there to distract us from the inestimable value to be found in "merely" luxuriating in surface pleasures.

Viola is only a little over an hour long, and while its concerns superficially mirror those of the French New Wave—Rohmer's teasing philosophical inquiries, Rivette's conflation of cinema and theater—Piñeiro seems content to merely float a few intriguing ideas rather than diligently follow through on any aspect in particular. It's a pleasant, negligible wisp of a movie, notable mostly for what it suggests of its director's potential.

The way Piñeiro structures his film is disorienting, but there's something intoxicating in his ability to layer themes upon themes without resorting to conventional movie comforts. This is felt most effectively in an early scene, when Sabrina (Elisa Carricajo) and Cecilia (Agustina Munoz), respectively "Olivia" and "Viola," rehearse their lines in Sabrin'a apartment.

Viola's hour-long running time contains little in the way of plot or action, and its only major event concerns the duplicitous efforts of a young woman to seduce her colleague in order to prove a point about romance and attraction, confined to a single sequence. And yet the world the film describes is so vividly realized that it seems to spill over the edges of the frame, as if the lives of its characters will continue after the credits roll.

Piñeiro unearths every bit of thought and feeling contained in this mercurial feature's brief running time, from the melancholy images of Viola pedaling her bike through the city to the free rein he gives his mostly female ensemble to create memorably individuated characters. (A brilliant rehearsal scene between two troupe members—very Rivette-like in its conception and execution—suggests depths of emotion that go far beyond the words being read.)

Piñeiro's brief career is already one to watch (as the phrase goes), genuinely striking out in new directions that have been compared to Rohmer and Rivette but which feel novel (and certainly ask you to watch closely).

Viola is a film fascinated by roles and how one gets in and out of them, just like the journey of the movie naturally finds its own fictions. This musical construction allows it to keep its own lightness and grace. Piñeiro seems to be open to every and any situation, exploring them while searching for new possible configurations for the movie.

This 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 Piñero'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.

[A] triumph of narrative imagination and bottom-line ingenuity, "Viola" looks as if it were made for pocket change, a detail that becomes less noticeable with every kink in the story line. That alone makes it required viewing for everyone who attends or teaches film school, though really, this miniature delight is a knot made for all to untie.

In essentially offering up The Twelfth Night as a hazy Shakespearean mash-up,Viola isn't so much deeply disrespecting notions of ownership, authorship, etc., as charitably redefining them.