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You Burn Me (Matías Piñeiro, 2024)

For Matías Piñeiro, the Argentine director best known for his cycle of six films inspired by Shakespeare’s comedies and centered on their female heroines, You Burn Me marks a singular departure. Piñeiro’s latest borrows not from the Bard but from the Italian poet and novelist Cesare Pavese, following an unnamed heroine (Maria Inês Gonçalves) who sets out to make a film loosely based on “Sea Foam,” a chapter from Pavese’s 1947 book Dialogues with Leucò. She casts herself in the film-within-the-film as a lovesick biology student, while Piñeiro’s longtime collaborators Gabi Saidón and María Villar play Pavese’s protagonists, the ancient Greek poet Sappho and the mountain nymph Britomart.

Any attempt at plot summary is doomed to failure, however, as You Burn Me dizzyingly hopscotches among its various literary inspirations, interweaving the student’s meanderings with Saidón and Villar’s reenactments of Pavese’s text, Sappho’s poems, and several footnotes from the lives of the two writers. You Burn Me—shot on tactile 16mm with a Bolex camera by the director and DP Tomás Paula Marques—isn’t so much concerned with telling a story as it is with breaking familiar narratives into myriad pieces and reassembling them in provocative and confounding ways. While recursions and variations are nothing new in Piñeiro’s cinema, You Burn Me deploys them to capture something about the act of reading itself. It’s not just that books dominate the frame, with recurrent shots of hands leafing through them and highlighting words; the film evokes what it feels like to read, which is to say, the restless associations our mind can conjure out of words on a page.

The day after You Burn Me’s premiere at the February 2024 Berlinale, I sat down with Piñeiro to discuss the film’s literary influences, his experience shooting with a Bolex for the first time, and the role that repetition plays in his cinema.

From Sappho’s fragmented poems to Pavese’s writings, You Burn Me is a film enamored of words and books. Can we start by talking about the emphasis you place on the act of reading? 

I never thought about making a movie about poetry, just like I didn’t write my previous Shakespeare films with the idea of making a film about theater. It was reading that drew me to them. I became attracted to Shakespeare, and then to Sappho and Pavese, because of what I experienced while reading their texts. But this is not a film about reading—it’s a film to read. That’s why there are so many shots of open books, and why those shots last so long. I wanted to leave you with time to read what was on the page, which is quite a strange experience in cinema; more conservative minds might say that shooting a page is uncinematic. Text in cinema is seen as a problem. But I like it when things are a problem. I think that reading a passage on the screen creates a sense of being shoulder to shoulder with the cameraperson. A kind of intimacy.

So how and where did the idea for the film begin? 

It all started with Antonioni’s Le amiche (1955), which I first saw at film school, and which was based on a book by Cesare Pavese. Then came Straub and Huillet, whose films drew me to another text by Pavese, Dialogues with Leucò. But that’s a lot denser, as a text; it has all kinds of references to other books and stories. That led me to the idea of making a film that wouldn’t just adapt the text but also its footnotes. Bear in mind that Dialogues is a lot more conceptual than Pavese’s other writings; it’s not a deviation from the 19th-century novel but something else entirely. This resistance I felt in the text was very interesting. I didn’t know how to shoot it; I couldn’t see myself approaching it the way I did my previous Shakespeare films, where I would pan around and do two- and sometimes eight-minute takes. We had to do things differently. And the fact that I didn’t know how or where to start was what attracted me so much to the idea.

You shot You Burn Me using a Bolex. How familiar were you with the camera, and with analog cinematography more broadly?

Not familiar at all. I mean, I have made films on 16mm in the past with Fernando Lockett as my cinematographer, but I’m really not a technical person. I’d never used a Bolex before, and when you work with one you’re bound to shots that usually last around 20 seconds. You’re always cutting, which forces you to think constantly in terms of associations—how is this image going to connect with the next, or the one before it? And suddenly, Sappho appeared. Agustina Muñoz [Piñeiro’s regular collaborator, who serves as narrator in You Burn Me] told me to read Anne Carson’s translations, and Sappho’s fractured poems spoke to this idea of fragmentation that I thought was connected to the Bolex. I didn’t know much when we began shooting—how I’d film the actors, or the text—and I remember being a bit skeptical at first, because at the end of the day You Burn Me closes a cycle that’s lasted more than 12 years, “Las Shakesperiadas.” That wasn’t easy. But I wanted to make a useful movie.

What do you mean by useful?

I wanted people to take something from the film—in this case, to learn a Sappho poem by heart. I like to think that You Burn Me may act as a machine that will turn the audience into a living archive of her fragmented, on-the-verge-of-disappearing work.

Critics like to talk about the use of repetition in your cinema. What role do you see it playing here?

Repetitions have always been a way for me to introduce artifice into my movies, to avoid making them a plain reflection of reality. I wanted You Burn Me to be a little more conceptual than my previous works. I wanted to explore a kind of formal violence and give new meanings to images we think we know. There’s a moment in the film when you hear an excerpt of a Sappho poem over a shot of waves rolling onto the shore; the poem speaks of “honey,” but that sweet word is synched to an image of something salty. These juxtapositions are a way of deconstructing things; they encourage you to think, see, and listen anew. I like that experience, and I want people to go through it as well, so they can avoid making totems out of things. That’s what I enjoy most about this game of repetitions and variations: the fact that some connections that arise from them are beyond me, and people can make their own, never mind how hard I may try to manipulate things. In the end, the film will always know more than I do; that’s why I don’t want it to have only one meaning. All these possible combinations produce multiple readings.

Your actors and camera don’t seem to move as much here as they do in your previous works, but the film is restless in its associations.  

That’s true. While in my previous works I would create that sense of movement by panning with the camera, or having actors move around the set, in You Burn Me, that was all in the editing. To be honest, I think I would have probably rushed things a lot more, but my editor, Gerard Borràs, suggested the opposite: he wanted the film to have more room to breathe, and our conversations helped us achieve a certain calm—an ability to be there. That didn’t happen in my previous films, where I was more fixated on what the drama needed. Shooting with a Bolex, and not having a real script, allowed us to react more to the present tense, and create that feeling of events unfolding in real time.

Could you speak about the film’s geography? Compared to some of your previous films—Hermia & Helena (2016), for example—You Burn Me unfolds in a world with no clear spatial markers, which heightens the characters’ dislocation. 

I think that feeling of dislocation you’re talking about speaks to their condition. These characters are dead, after all, and this is a ghost movie. The space they inhabit is suspended, as is the bond between them. I think my decision to avoid the usual pans has to do with the fact that I was rejecting a more classical sense of realism. As in, I knew I was going to collect fragments and come up with crazy combinations of things: in the scene at the beach, the wave you see was captured in San Sebastián, Spain, but the cliff we cut to is from Mar del Plata, Argentina, and the shadow from the other side of the cliff was shot in Athens, Greece. The film is a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster in that respect, and I really like that you can see the stitches. I wanted something that would look rough and decentered. I’ve long been inspired by Orson Welles’s Shakespeare movies—not so much Macbeth (1948), where he uses long shots, but Chimes at Midnight (1965) and Othello (1951) especially, where anytime you see an actor shot from the back it means they weren’t available anymore, and Welles had to make do with what he had. And I don’t mean “inspired” in the sense that I have ever quoted Welles. It’s his idea of making something dirty, something messy, yet constantly moving and alive—that’s what I love, too.

Leonardo Goi is a critic and columnist at MUBI Notebook, an editor at Senses of Cinema, and a regular contributor to The Film Stage, Reverse Shot, and Filmmaker Magazine, among other publications. He coordinates and mentors at the Berlinale Talent Press, a workshop for emerging film critics.