About a month ago,
I came across a
review from the Locarno Film Festival about a film called Helena & Hermia. Loosely based on
the eponymous characters in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, it was directed by Argentinean filmmaker Matías Piñeiro, and forms a
continuation of his ‘Shakespeareada’ – an ongoing interrogation and
recontextualising of stories taken out of Shakespeare’s plays (so far, only his
Comedies), and placed in the suburban environments of Buenos Aires.
To date, Piñeiro’s
‘Shakespeareada’ consists of Rosalinda (2011), Viola (2012), The Princess of France
(2014), and the just-released Helena & Hermia (2016).
In both Viola and The Princess of France, the two of his
films more readily available, the structure is essentially similar, albeit in
slightly different augmentations: there is an extended sequence of material
from the respective Shakespearean source-plays (in order, As You Like It; Twelfth Night;
Love’s Labour’s Lost; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), followed by
a series of riffs, loops, fugues, and rhapsodies upon the material – both seen
and unseen – by the characters.
