Matías Piñeiro’s Viola and the Resonant Drift of Love

If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken, and so die. That strain again, it had a dying fall. Oh, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound, that breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor. Enough, no more. ‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before. O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou, That, notwithstanding thy capacity Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there, Of what validity and pitch soe’er, But falls into abatement and low price Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy That it alone is high fantastical.

—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 1

With this brief monologue, Orsino, the Duke of Iliria, opens Twelfth Night, the Shakespearean comedy that is being rehearsed by a group of female performers in Matías Piñeiro’s film Viola (2012). Although the fragment quoted above does not appear in the film, it aptly expresses how the discordant “spirit of love” resists categorization into a single meaning. The spirit of love emerges as a synesthetic “sweet sound” that “breathes upon a bank of violets,” later turning into an intolerable noise that falls “into abatement and low price.” Viola articulates the precarious shapes of “fancy” through the entanglement of different discourses, genres, and subjects, allowing theatre, literature, music, design, maps, text messages, emails, and pirated films to intersect in a vibrant dialogue.

It is now firmly accepted that one of the characteristics of contemporary aesthetic production pertains to the loss of boundaries between disciplines and artistic genres. As Florencia Garramuño states: “Contemporary aesthetics’ transformations propitiate modes of organization of the sensible that put into crisis ideas of belongingness, specificity and autonomy” (245). Such porosity of language not only questions automatized categorization of genres (how a form responds to an identity), but also strengthens new forms of interaction between fiction and reality, art and spectator. By means of technical and narrative operations, Viola positions itself in that interstice in order to create an indiscernible zone where gender identities and meanings are dissolved. In this article, I will first examine how the tension between cinema and theatre that lies at the heart of the film breaks boundaries between different forms of perception. Second, I will explore in what way the baroque imaginary unleashed by the Shakespearean play contributes to blurring the limits between reality and artifice. Finally, I will explore how the performative² repetition of texts and gestures creates an unstable affective network in which bodies, sounds, and gazes contaminate characters’ everyday lives. I will conclude that Viola shows that the resonance of love, as a social and affective force, circulates beyond what is visible.

Cinema and Theatre in Tension

Matías Piñeiro (1982, Buenos Aires) is a graduate of the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, currently living in New York. He has made five films to date: El hombre robado (2007), Todos mienten (2009), Rosalinda (2011), Viola (2012), and La princesa de Francia (2014), the last of which was released at the Lorcano Film Festival. The first two films engage with the work of 19^th-century Argentine writer and statesman Domingo Faustino Sarmiento,³ while Rosalinda, Viola, and La princesa de Francia⁴ are part of a series of films that explore the feminine world in William Shakespeare’s comedies. Viola was released in September 2012 at the Toronto International Film Festival and shown at the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) in 2013, where María Villar, Agustina Muñoz, Elisa Carricajo, and Romina Paula shared the award for best female performer. As in other Piñeiro films, a literary text (in this case the rehearsal of a scene from a Shakespeare comedy) becomes the catalyst for a series of unexpected connections. The film’s plot is apparently simple. The title character delivers pirated DVDs throughout the Buenos Aires as part of her boyfriend’s video business. Along the way she joins up with a group...