by Sean Donovan
As part of their series of drive-in events, the New York Film Festival programmed Matías Piñeiro’s latest Shakespeare-influenced drama Isabella alongside Pedro Almodóvar and Tilda Swinton’s delicious queer treasure The Human Voice (previously unpacked by Nathaniel). In some ways this choice makes sense: both films relish in vivid expressions of color, the kind of experiences you would want to have in as close to a theatrical environment as we can get right now. But in terms of intensity and impact the films could not be more different, Human Voice’s sledgehammer playfulness is a misplaced introduction to Piñeiro’s foggy and ultimately disappointing drama.
Isabella is named after the main character of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, one of the bard’s ‘problem plays’ positioned awkwardly between comedy and drama. Isabella displays no proclivities towards the comedic, but it may have internalized the problem play position of being stuck between choices and controlled by doubt...
These are the issues plaguing actress and visual artist Mariel (María Villar) as she seeks a language of creative expression. The majority of the film explores her relationship with Luciana (Agustina Muñoz), a friend and more accomplished actress, as they both circle the role of Isabella in an avant-garde production of Measure for Measure mounted by a distant, authoritative director. A third woman Sol (Gabriela Saidón) exists solely as a sounding board for Mariel’s thoughts and feelings when the screenplay can’t find other means of expressing them. The story unfurls in a non-linear fashion with little attempt to ground the viewer in solid context: Mariel’s pregnancy in some scenes becomes the clearest rationale of distinct timelines. With an almost structural intensity Piñeiro returns to repeated scenes and motifs- walking around a public pool, climbing a staircase, a monologue about twelve stones, a long dock gangway- often locked in the same formal compositions each time we revisit them. The film’s storytelling patterns, though clearly of a confident and secure logic, do not always link well with the emotional experiences of the characters.
While The Human Voice emphasized bold reds, greens, and grays, Isabella is thoroughly enamored with purple, a color that, early on in the film, is said to be all about mediation: cooling a fiery red, or warming up a frigid blue to make purple. This schematic is reflected in the women’s costumes, Mariel most often appearing in blue with Luciana in bright red, an almost embarrassingly overt signification amidst a film that is more often frustratingly opaque. Nonetheless Isabella’s purples are quite visually appealing, the camera finding many shades of evocative purple light and creative uses of the color evocative of Kieslowki’s Three Colors trilogy.
Puzzlebox narratives like Isabella, told in elliptical and disordered fragments leading to a partially visible whole, can be very satisfying when done correctly. Unfortunately in this instance, the structure feels like an arbitrary add-on, or a feat of structural gamesmanship for its own sake, without clear relation to the thematic and emotional content of Mariel’s journey. The result is an odd isolating of the lovely central performance from María Villar, who finds nuanced details to demarcate where the nervous, ambivalent Mariel is in time. Her work is obscured by the tentative rambling of the film’s plotting. Purple may be a lovely color mediation, but Isabella can’t quite meld its innovative structure with a connection to compelling theme and character.