Featured September 2–20, 2017, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
(mfa.org)
Argentine filmmaker Matías
Piñeiro’s Hermia & Helena continues his direction of contemporary stories
linked to Shakespeare’s heroines, in this case the love-crossed women from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Loosely, the
filmmaker’s protagonists, Camila and Carmen, share love objects the way
Shakespeare’s Hermia and Helena do—Camila loves Lukas, Carmen’s old boyfriend,
and Carmen has her eye on Leo, Camila’s old lover. Riffing further on
Shakespeare’s love for “switches,” Camila and Carmen swap apartments—Camila
takes over Carmen’s New York City pad to pursue the same arts fellowship that
Carmen has just left; and Carmen takes over Camila’s pad in Buenos Aires. In a
sense they swap lives, but with different end results, for Camila, whose
fellowship project is translating A
Midsummer Night’s Dream into Spanish, has clear objectives and purpose, while
Carmen feels she’s wallowing in the same place as the year before.
The movie’s achievement is its
rendering of contemporary life, not only in its portrayal of young adults coping
with carving a satisfying future for themselves, but also in its filmmaking techniques,
or creativity. Hermia & Helena
will likely get few stars from viewers who judge according to convention, but
its contrivances, artifice, and experimental intrusions add the exact dimension
of young artists at work today.
Agustina Muñoz as Camila is worth the entire ninety minutes in the
theater. Her face, all of its thoughts and expressions, and her voice, so firm
and self-assured, mesmerize but also deliver a wonderfully powerful female
character. (Thank you, Mr. Piñeiro.)
The passivity and guarded personality of Lukas (Keith Poulson)—Camila’s character
foil—also portray reality in two ways: the lack of opportunities for trained artists
in a glutted and information-age professional world, and the fear many young adults—not just men—have
of risking a serious relationship. In contrast to Lukas, Camila has no fears
and goes after what she wants. She’s in New York not really for the arts
residency but in order to find an old love—Gregg (Dustin Guy Defa)—and also to meet her American father Horace
(Dan Sallitt), who never took any responsibility for her mother’s accidental pregnancy,
nor ever considered looking for his Argentine offspring. Because of her intelligent,
direct approach, Camila gets the answers she’s come for. Her father’s past disinterest
and dissociation inevitably cause her grief, but her rational understanding of
people and life allows her to accept him, at least formally. Here, there seems
to be an important omission in the subtitles. Camila’s in bed under the covers
at her father’s house after their painful conversation. We hear her voice leaving
a message for her half-sister Mariane in Buenos Aires who has just given birth
to a first son. Between restrained sobs, Camila congratulates Mariane and says,
“Camilo,” we assume the boy’s name. But the subtitles say, “Beautiful” and omit
the “Camilo.” Thus, a deep love-tribute to Camila is lost, and it’s an
important one for it juxtaposes Camila’s sisterly love against the nonexistent
paternal love of her past, and probably her future.
The interspersed contrivances that contemporize the
movie for better or worse, depending on the viewer, include periodic rag music
for transitions; flashbacks to Buenos Aires marking each month Camila has been
in New York; the subplot of Daniele (another Shakespearean swap, this one of
friends); Gregg’s short film (a film within a film alla Pyramus and Thisbee of A Midsummer Night’s Dream); handwritten
chapter titles, not unlike acts; and a few dream sequences showing Camila’s
unconscious at work on her translation (possibly paralleling the fairies’ forest).
But all of these devices work in their mishmash way toward a resolution for the
principal characters that completes the movie—with a door shutting and opening, shutting and
opening (just like life). Both Camila and Lukas agree to
set out and dare change—an unknown future—rather than stagnate in the same
place. Piñeiro’s filmmaking mirrors the characters’ trajectory and
steps in its own uninhibited and creative direction.
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