Having enjoyed considerably another of Matías Piñeiro's movies (Viola, 2012) I gave a try to Hermia & Helena. I was disappointed. This film deals with the professional and personal world of several female characters, principally Camila and her friend Carmen. Carmen (María Villar) has spent a year in New York supported by a fellowship to carry out an (unexplained) project that didn't pan out. She returns to Buenos Aires at the same time her friend Camila (Agustina Muñoz) is about to travel to New York to undertake another project under the same fellowship, a Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Carmen and Camila swap their New York and Buenos Aires apartments. Then Carmen disappears from the tale and the rest of the movie is about Camila, her project (that seems to move at a snail's pace) and, mainly, her shifting romantic connections both in New York and in Buenos Aires.
The problem: the tale is told in disjointed episodes and acted in a cold and sometimes perfunctory way. Muñoz and Villar are first rate actresses and were very charismatic in Viola, where conversations had the rythhm and feel of real talk. Here, they are sometimes given stilted and unnatural lines (especially in English). And there are forced attempts at artsiness such as transitions New York - Buenos Aires marked by unsteady images of a New York bridge combined with Argentinian trees. Is this what one sees on the way to the airport in each city?
There is, however, an intensely moving last scene where Camila confronts warily but warmly the father she never knew. In spite of this and other positives, Hermia & Helena doesn't fulfill expectations.
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