The Princess of France opens on a blank screen. Then two sets of subtitles conveying some preliminary comments from a radio DJ who’s introducing a broadcast of Schumann’s First Symphony. The DJ soon ends his spiel (concluding it with a dedication to someone named ‘Lorena’), the music swells, and the black screen is replaced by a swooping camera movement followed by a tilt downward to a game of soccer, captured from the lofty viewpoint of a distant rooftop. Only half of the pitch is visible to the viewer. The game we see progresses ambiguously, a series of incomplete movements flitting in and out of the camera’s perspective, and the action on the pitch turns bizarre, one team’s players gradually multiplying while the others’ diminishes, eventually leaving only a goalie alone against a field of adversaries. The camera remains stationary as the opposing team form a line and charge, then it leaves the roof to follow the goalie as she flees through the adjacent streets, stripping off her uniform and slowing back down to an ordinary walk.
This odd scene stands out, not only as an alluring puzzle of a standalone set-piece, but as the only camera setup involving any measure of distance. The rest of The Princess of France occurs in fuzzy close-up and shallow-focus medium shots, as director Matias Piñeiro maps the web of interrelation and incidence joining a loosely-structured Shakespearian troupe. As with Piñeiro’s previous two “Shakespereads” projects – Rosalinda and Viola – the presence of the Bard’s words are a defining narrative factor, both the central motivation and the key to unlocking the oblique circumstances and seemingly inconsequential plotting. Seeking to reinvent and reinterpret the character of these plays, rather than slavishly reconstruct them, the Argentinean director again imagines the work of this most influential of writers as an organizing force, one that both overtly inspires his characters and retroactively comments on their modern conditions. The intro to the Schumann piece mentions the presence of fellow composer Felix Mendelssohn as conductor, and the film keeps up the running theme of collaboration as both an artistic and emotional state, the tension between players and creators typifying a series of deceitful relationships that turn into pitched power struggles.
The plot goes like this: Returning to Buenos Aires from Mexico after the death of his father, Victor (Julian Larquier Tellarini) finds himself gifted with enough grant money to stage a radio drama of a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the Shakespeare play he’d put on the previous year. Getting the cast back together should be simple, Victor figures, but the situation is complicated by his having at some point been romantically involved with his entire female cast. His relationship with his ostensible girlfriend is further complicated by her current affair with his friend Guillermo, the only other male in the troupe. Guillermo is also replacing Victor in his role as the Princess of France, the invading character who, in the play, brings the distracting force of love into the peaceful kingdom of Navarre.
The source play, in which the princess and her coterie of ladies disturb King Ferdinand and his men’s plans of devoting themselves to chastity and self-improvement, thus transforms into a gender-swapped roundelay in which aggressive male lust disrupts the ability to convey this story. It seems key here that no one is technically a creator, but both the director and the actors work in a time-honored second-hand format, with the integration of material from other Shakespeare works, which stretches the boundaries of the Bard’s own heavy borrowing. In this atmosphere of mimicry and deceit the content of the words means less than the way in which they’re spoken. Also significant are objects, which take on a totemic significance in their capacity to pass on and communicate unspoken information, as when two notes inside identical texts of the Shakespeare play taking on further significance. Tracing out this series of wrinkles, disruptions and conflicts which emerge from a simple staging of a 425-year-old play, Piñeiro taps into the spirit of the text by regarding it as a living work, a commentary on the sort of universal human shortcomings that plague us to this day.