Isabella (2020, Matías Piñeiro) (Patreon)

41/100

As usual, it seems like a waste of both my time and yours to tackle the latest installment in Piñeiro's Shakespearean project, which has never been of more than scant interest to me despite—or, I dunno, maybe due to—my love for Shakespeare and the theater generally. (NYFF adores the guy, and I'm a completist, so just ignoring him hasn't been an option.) Measure for Measure is the foundation this time, with the play's sibling relationship flipped in real life (she desperately begs a favor of him); because Piñeiro is apparently allergic to drama, neither this dynamic nor Mariel's unspoken rivalry with Luciana ever transcends polite frustration and disappointment. These microconfrontations, to coin a term, mistake banality for subtlety, though at one point Piñeiro rather uncharacteristically conveys a character's troubled mindset by fading her in and out as if she were a ghost or a dream figure. The film also seems to take its twelve-stone ritual seriously, and that kind of self-help exercise reliably rolls my eyes to the back of my head. Scrambling the chronology added little, to my mind, apart from Mariel's pregnancy serving a metaphorical purpose that might otherwise have been less effective. I will say that this is Piñeiro's most visually sumptuous film to date, with many scenes playing like excuses to shoot in stunning locations. (There's also an interstitial motif that surely works better if you're not colorblind; the very first thing we see and hear are shades of purple and its description—kinda lost on me, since I can barely detect the red that distinguishes purple from a dark blue.) But by the time Mariel and Luciana, embodied by mainstays María Villar and Agustina Muñoz, bond by playfully repeating one of Isabella's more verbose lines again and again in unison, calling to mind Viola's (admittedly terrific) repetitive rehearsal, I had more or less checked out, as I always do. It's not impossible that Piñeiro will eventually make something I don't shrug at, but he'll need to abandon this particular creative mode.