Hermia & Helena

Cities, centuries, cultures, crushes and characters from Shakespeare intertwine in a story inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream. Camila is an art exchange student drifting between Buenos Aires and New York. The different worlds and people that she encounters reveal unexpected aspects of herself.

Shakespeare's play is quite complex as it is. Interpreting the play into Spanish, vaulting across hemispheres and learning an array of new and multifaceted characters, left my head spinning. Other than the brain freeze that ensued after trying to put all these elements together, the film is a dreamy, cerebral delight. I should have read or seen Shakespeare's play again before attempting this film. Seen at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival.

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.

Dedicated to Ozu star Setsuko Hara, Argentine director Matias Piñeiro's Hermia and Helena follows his three previous films, "Viola," "The Princess of France", and "Rosalinda," with a work depicting characters loosely based on female heroines in William Shakespeare's comedies. Shot in Buenos Aires and partly in New York, the film centers on Camila (Agustina Muñoz, "The Princess of France"), a Buenos Aires theater director, who has been invited to New York to translate Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" into Spanish and then go back to Argentina to rehearse. According to Piñeiro, "It is a film about coming and going, about changing states, changing languages and sounds." Inspired by his own experience in New York where he came on a fellowship in the arts, Piñeiro shifts the focus from a high energy fast-talking beginning in Buenos Aires to a more laid back thoughtful mood in New York. Camilla is in New York to replace Carmen (Maria Villar, "The Princess of France"), a friend from Buenos Aires, in the institute as well as in her rental apartment. Like the two young women in Shakespeare's play, Camila and her friend share relationships in a sequence of vignettes that take place over the course of a year. Divided into chapters bearing the names of the characters featured in the episode such as "Carmen & Camila," "Camila & Danièle," "Gregg & Camila," and so on, the film is enhanced by a spirited piano score.

Piñeiro manages to keep things light and the sequences have a playful feeling in keeping with the spirit of the Shakespeare play. Camilla begins where Carmen left off, picking up on her relationship with hipster Yank Lukas (Keith Poulson, "Little Sister") and local filmmaker Gregg (Dustin Guy Defa) who shows one of his short films made from footage of a 1940's black and white film with a voice-over based on Du Maurier's Rebecca. There is an enigmatic relationship with Daniele (Mati Diop, "Fort Buchanan"), another member of the institute, who has been traveling in the mid-west and who sends Camila post-cards from the cities she visits that Camila hangs on a map on her wall. Flashbacks to Buenos Aires also include Carmen's boyfriend Leo (Julian Larquier Tellarini, "Terror 5").

The film is about movement, from one place to another and from one relationship to another but the characters and their relationships remain undeveloped. Piñeiro jumps from sequence to sequence without staying long enough for us to get to know them as human beings. Though the episodes are labeled "one month earlier," "three months earlier," and so forth, the flashbacks are confusing as to time and place and are difficult to follow. If we are left uninvolved in Camila's various attempts at personal connection up to this point, we are definitely engaged in her search for a deeper experience that leads to a reunion with Horace (Dan Sallitt, "Honeymoon"), the estranged American father whom she had never met.

Though Hermia's father Egeus in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a demanding parent who insists that she marry Demetrius and forego marrying her love for Lysander, Horace is not Hermia's authoritarian father but the reverse. In a visit to his home in upstate New York, the two exchange a series of intimate questions, playing a game of you ask, I tell, then vice versa. The conversation maintains a tone of civility and we get a more rounded picture of Camila but the film drifts slowly but noticeably into melancholy.

Piñeiro has said about Hermia and Helena that, "Many plot elements remain somewhat hidden. Instead, you focus on the atmosphere that springs from the characters' encounters with each other." While the atmosphere is always present for us to focus on, the "somewhat hidden" elements of the plot border on obscurity and ultimately detract from our ability to understand the characters. According to the director, "Not everything is connected to everything." This was also true in my experience.

Having enjoyed considerably another of Matías Piñeiro's movies (Viola, 2012) I gave a try to Hermia & Helena. I was disappointed. This film deals with the professional and personal world of several female characters, principally Camila and her friend Carmen. Carmen (María Villar) has spent a year in New York supported by a fellowship to carry out an (unexplained) project that didn't pan out. She returns to Buenos Aires at the same time her friend Camila (Agustina Muñoz) is about to travel to New York to undertake another project under the same fellowship, a Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Carmen and Camila swap their New York and Buenos Aires apartments. Then Carmen disappears from the tale and the rest of the movie is about Camila, her project (that seems to move at a snail's pace) and, mainly, her shifting romantic connections both in New York and in Buenos Aires.

The problem: the tale is told in disjointed episodes and acted in a cold and sometimes perfunctory way. Muñoz and Villar are first rate actresses and were very charismatic in Viola, where conversations had the rythhm and feel of real talk. Here, they are sometimes given stilted and unnatural lines (especially in English). And there are forced attempts at artsiness such as transitions New York - Buenos Aires marked by unsteady images of a New York bridge combined with Argentinian trees. Is this what one sees on the way to the airport in each city?

There is, however, an intensely moving last scene where Camila confronts warily but warmly the father she never knew. In spite of this and other positives, Hermia & Helena doesn't fulfill expectations.

I just saw this film last night. At first I was going to praise the director for his ambitious decision to cast androids in every single role, but then I came to and realized that I had just watched the flattest, most emotionally antiseptic, charisma-free inconsequentiality ever committed to screen. The dialog is bare and boring, delivered in a near monotone by a cast that is interchangeable by way of their characters' equal absence of personality. When the "story" took a few turns for the potentially dramatic, I felt like I was watching The Asperger's Players Presents. This film makes the most muted mumblecore flick feel like Who's Afraid Of Virgina Wolf.

See!!! People waiting to get buzzed into walk up apartments! See!!! The protagonist banally flit between neutered boyfriends! See!!! Someone pay for Spanish lessons in cash! As someone who is tired of bloated, Hollywood action sequels and intelligence insulting comedies, I do my best to support indie and foreign film. I enjoy a wide variety of film genres and styles from the past to the present, including small budgeted pictures that feature realistic or understated performances, but come on! The acting and the dialog weren't "realistic" "subtle" or "understated" they were just bad for the reasons stated in the first paragraph. I fail to understand why some of these poorer "alternative" films are getting a pass by critics and some audience members. Perhaps by acknowledging that there are some real duds in the subset, they might be admitting to the cold fact that the much of contemporary cinema maybe on the decline.

Just because you have a tiny budget, doesn't mean you have to make a tiny film.

BTW, I posted this review in the comments section of other on-line publications and it got deleted. So, you can be censored for not agreeing with the critic? What is the point of the comment section then? I'm just trying to make sure people don't waste their money.