‘Ariel’: Shakespeare’s characters in search of a movie | Cinema: premieres and reviews

The storm It is considered one of William Shakespeare’s most magical and cryptic works. Prospero, its protagonist, has always been considered a transcript of its author, and if one thing is certain, it is that it is one of his most difficult pieces to land. Arielthe new project by Galician director Lois Patiño, is inspired by Shakespeare’s work, but it is neither exactly a film nor exactly a play. It is not even entirely a dream, as one of the two actresses who double as Ariel, the mischievous spirit of The storm and of this unclassifiable and stimulating experiment around an island that lives trapped in the circular destiny of Shakespearean fiction and its torrent of words.

The germ of Ariel It is the short film of 2021 Sycoraxcreated by Patiño and the Argentine director Matías Piñeiro around the witch and mother of Calibán. From that job, Patiño returns to the same landscape of the Azores without his Argentine colleague, but with the actress Agustina Muñoz and Irene Escolar, the double face of Ariel. Both are characters and both play themselves: the realist Muñoz versus the idealistic Escolar.

Ariel follows in the footsteps of Agustina, an Argentine actress who travels from Galicia to the Azores to join, as Ariel, a theater company. As soon as he docks on the island he begins to notice something strange: everyone there talks as if they were characters from Shakespeare’s plays. With a creative freedom that floods the screen with gestures typical of the theater of the absurd, but also of the street and popular, Ariel runs with lightness and humor through an almost unreal Atlantic mist. The sound and color of the ocean (with an intense chromaticism thanks to Ion de Sosa’s photography), make up an alchemy that affects the characters, the landscape and the viewer himself, who travels hand in hand with Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet or the witches of Macbeth to a place as real as it is imaginary in which the Shakespearean voice infects everything.

After the experience of Samsarain which Patiño transported the viewer with unusual beauty and emotion through the caves of a reincarnation, the Galician director proposes here another type of experiment, which without reaching the achievement of his previous film, risks proposing a free and playful cinema in which the bard’s word guides us through the secrets of the island while opening up to a meta-reflection, more Pirandellian than Shakespearean. That is the enchantment that flies over the island and in a somewhat tragic way to the Ariel-Irene Escolar, spirit of the island-stage, committed to the end with her character and with a life trapped in the infinite mirror of fiction.