Isabella (Matías Piñeiro, 2020)

A consensus seems to be building that Isabella is a bit of a disappointment from Pineiro. I'll have to disagree, although I certainly see that it represents a somewhat different path for this filmmaker whose work has been thus far marked by an almost modular consistency. Several years ago, I met Piñeiro briefly when I was introducing him at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival. Kicking off the Q&A, I asked him what seemed like the most obvious first question: why Shakespeare? He answered that as a creator -- I'm paraphrasing here -- it was too difficult to face an utterly blank canvas, and so taking up a preexisting text gave him a foundation from which to begin.

In that case, it could well be that Piñeiro is evolving past that dependency. Unlike his previous features, where the Shakespearean text was rather central, Isabella uses Measure For Measure in only the most nominal way. In fact, the audition for the role of Isabella in a Buenos Aires production of Measure For Measure is practically a distraction for Mariel (María Villar), since it not only takes her focus away from her own production, but provokes a crisis of faith in her own abilities as an actress.

Mariel feels she should have an inside track for the Isabella audition, because her brother (Pablo Sigal) has tipped her off to what they are looking for. But she still doesn't get the part, losing out to a younger actress, Luciana (Augustina Muñoz). But Isabella moves us quickly through time, showing us that the production was not all that rewarding for Luciana, and she too ended up leaving the theater world for a time. It is only later, while working to stage Mariel's own play, that the two women find their way back into their art.

The scene that Piñeiro has the women use for the audition, not incidentally, is the one in which Isabella pleads with Angelo for Claudio's life, and Angelo tells her she has to sleep with him. So the entire process of judgment and evaluation for women within the casting process is boiled down to the sexual proposition, and who is and is not willing to give themselves over (to the director, to the audience, to the theater itself) for exploitation.

By contrast, Mariel's own production is all about choice, and specifically the moment of decision when a person decides whether or not they are going to make a break and do something different. Isabella begins with an image of a pier and a monologue describing the "ritual of the stones," wherein someone lobs twelve rocks into the water and, by the twelfth one, knows whether they will throw it or hold onto it, marking a major decision point. (The monologue also discusses "purple," as a color and a concept -- a liminal hue that is "a cool red, a hot blue.")

The design and provisional mock-ups of Mariel's production provide punctuation marks throughout Isabella. The set is comprised of concentric squares that are internally lighted with different colors, stepping up and down according to temperature. There is a James Turrell quality to the entire set-up, but the dominant motif strongly recalls Josef Albers' Homage to the Square paintings, together with an unlikely synthesis of Robert Smithson (rocks and piers) and Dan Flavin (colored fluorescent tubes).

This is the most visually sophisticated film Piñeiro has made, and it coincides with the diminution of Shakespeare as his conceptual linchpin. This could mean that his cinema is developing from a more verbal toward a move visual art. It could suggest that his interest in theater as a discourse has embraced modernism over classicism. Or perhaps Isabella is operating on new ontological premises. We are all taught in school that Shakespeare endures because he understood "human nature," that his plays are just as relevant today as they were in his time. This may or may not be the case, but "human nature" means something very different to minimalist art. It's about the physical capacities of the body -- of seeing, of moving around. To claim that those aspects of human existence seldom change: that is a suggestion of an entirely different order.