The Movie Room

Isabella 2020, directed by Matías Piñeiro

Rating: 9/10

Matías Piñeiro’s Shakespeare films (adaptations? homages? companion texts?) really fascinate me. Each (at least of those I have seen) is named after one (or two, in the case of Hermia & Helena) of Shakespeare’s female characters, and features actors in the modern day working through the play text and how to adapt it, while their own lives reflect the themes and character arcs of the Shakespeare plays they study. Of the ones I have seen, Isabella is by far my favorite.

Isabella, in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, is a novice nun who pleads with the ruler of a city to spare her brother’s life after he is sentenced to death for impregnating his lover before they can get married; the ruler in turn tells Isabella that he will free her brother if she gives him her virginity. There are two actors vying to play Isabella—Mariel, played by María Villar, who is the pregnant sister of the play’s director who is signed up to audition before he even asked her if she wanted to, and Luciana, played by Agustina Muñoz, who is the mistress of the director that was originally cast as Isabella before dropping out for a movie role and who now has to audition again when her schedule has been freed up by filming delays. The connection between the narratives of Isabella being asked to trade her virginity for her brother’s life and these two actresses dealing with their own relationships with the director is tenuous at best, but the thematic ideas resonate as the two women read from the play as they rehearse together and take bits of Isabella’s predicament and use them to approach their own problems. Just as Isabella must look at things through a new perspective and consider what she would sacrifice, the film does so through the repeated imagery of Mariel’s art exhibit about ritualistic stone throwing which plays with various shades of lights. The recurrent cuts to these brightly colored rectangular frames break up the scenes which are taken out of order and are both effective and beautiful in how they tie together scenes that are assembled more abstractly than in many other films.

Beyond the abstract visuals and the Shakespearean overtones, what really makes this film work is the interplay between Villar and Muñoz. Both are regulars in Piñeiro’s films, but Isabella in particular works as a great showcase for both their talents. There are many scenes of them walking through the countryside, over rivers, and through trees where they recite Measure for Measure lines together interspersed with commentary on the shared man in their life, and about their own hopes and dreams; these scenes are so calm and relaxing and so beautifully performed, they stand in stark contrast to the editing of the film as a whole. This film is much less straightforward than the other Piñeiro films I have seen, but its abstract structure works so well because the scenes contained within it are so beautifully grounded. Even though these women are joined together because of a man, his presence feels pretty negligible in the way that they handle it. 

Viola, The Princess of France, and Hermia & Helena are all worth checking out, and I am personally interested in seeing other Piñeiro films that I have not yet caught, but I think that Isabella is the best that I have seen so far. It is not the most accessible, that would probably be Hermia & Helena, but Isabella’s expressionistic filmmaking mixed with humanistic performances works magic in showing the importance of Shakespeare in the modern age.