Review: With Isabella, Matías Piñeiro’s Artistry Slides Further into Abstraction

Matías Piñeiro’s Isabella, a cubist riddle composed of elliptical scenes that hint at conflict, finds the Argentine writer-director sliding further into abstraction than ever before. A surprising pivot after his 2016 English-language debut, Hermia & Helena, which gracefully toyed with more familiar forms, Piñeiro’s latest unfolds at times like a Hollis Frampton-esque image association game. The film cloaks its muted, wispy narrative in symbolic digressions and repetitive formal gestures that imply some grand design just beyond comprehension—a fitting analogy given the recurring presence of an overhead shot of hands arranging a puzzle consisting only of differently shaded notecards.

Revolving around two casual acquaintances in the Buenos Aires DIY theater scene, Mariel (María Villar) and Luciana (Agustina Muñoz), Isabella suggests David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive but with a more scrambled timeline and much cooler emotional temperature. More specifically, that temperature is akin to purple, a color used extensively in the film and described early on as “a cooled red or a heated blue—fragility and strength at the same time.”

This poetic assessment comes courtesy of an opening monologue—the first of many in the film—given by an off-screen narrator about the philosophical dimensions of doubt and inaction, qualities the narrator links to the color purple based on a shared sense of liminality. These qualities define Mariel, a woman struggling with her finances, expecting a child, and undergoing an audition process for the role of Isabella in a new take on William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure—three pivotal components of her character that must be gleaned bit by bit given that Piñeiro sculpts Isabella’s narrative around unannounced leaps in time.

As with all of Piñeiro’s films, Shakespeare’s work is used less as rigid source material than as a flexible starting point; the characters’ constant recitations of passages from Measure for Measure seem at once subtextually suggestive and purely textural. As to whether Piñeiro’s players are conceived as corollaries to those in the dramas they rehearse, that’s hardly a one-to-one equation, though there are certain elements of Measure for Measure that echo across Isabella’s narrative proper—Mariel’s pregnant belly being one of them, but more pointedly the use of a male figure who’s one character’s brother and another’s lover. In the film, Mariel’s brother (Guillermo Solovey) is seen only briefly and yet holds a powerful sway over the story—as both a source of money (for Mariel) and love (for Luciana)—and his arrival in Buenos Aires after some time away is a recurring topic of conversation, with a wide shot of the country road on which his car will presumably appear returned to on numerous occasions.

There’s unresolved tension in Mariel and Luciana’s relationship—subtle hints of jealousy, envy, guilt, and deceit—but none of it is articulated in the script, which is composed largely of excerpts from Measure for Measure. Instead, it’s visible in Villar’s expressive face, which is further inflected by the varied light shone on it by Fernando Lockett’s cinematography. One of Isabella’s subplots—relayed, like everything here, in discrete fragments that gradually reveal the full extent of what we’re looking at—revolves around a Rothko-esque light installation being prepared by Mariel and her friend, Sol (Gabriela Saidon). The piece involves multiple white boards stacked in succession in a room with windows cut from each in receding size—all of it illuminated by hidden LED lights and scored to a backdrop of lo-fi electronic music. A clarifying view of this installation, with colors undulating in the spectrums between red, blue and green, features in several instances as a wordless refrain in the film, and other times the installation is felt merely as a glow on the face of Villar, who in something of a eureka moment processes disappointment and betrayal as her face absorbs a slow shift from purple to red.

Piñeiro specializes in melodious verbosity, so his embrace of more painterly forms of expression, present in Hermia & Helena and aided here by sojourns to pastoral Córdoba, points to his desire to expand his repertoire. It’s not that he was ever slack with the camera—Viola is one of the more elegantly choreographed films of the 2010s—but that there’s a greater emphasis on light, color, and static composition as their own conveyors of meaning. But unlike in Hermia & Helena, Isabella never fully harmonizes its formal play with its intimations of character psychology, and in fact threatens to obfuscate the latter with the former. Beyond the timeline jumping and polychromatic light shows, there’s a running metaphor about a rock-throwing game that ties into the earlier monologue about doubt, and Piñeiro obsesses over portraiture of stones and the hands that hold and paint over them. The stones even make an appearance in the installation, appearing to vanish when certain shades of light fall on them.

It’s a neat visual trick, but one has to strain to parse its connection to Mariel’s dilemmas, and Villar and Muñoz are riveting enough in their portrayals to go without buttressing metaphors. Piñeiro remains a superlative director of actors and a careful modulator of rhythm, and part of Isabella’s longueurs have to do with an effort to provide respite from just how fast everyone talks and walks in the film. But the drama of external turbulence and internal reckoning being sketched in the film, particularly as it relates to emerging motherhood, feels emotionally distinct from the amorous entanglements that Piñeiro was reveling in just half a decade ago in such films as Viola and The Princess of France, and if he’s indeed entering a phase of middle-aged concerns, it’s easy to feel primed for something deeply moving to come next. If that’s the case, then Isabella feels like a stylistic and thematic trial run.