Review: Ariel
by David Katz
- Lois Patiño returns with a dramatic fresco derived from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, before he spirals further into the Bard’s oeuvre

If you exposed a good edition of William Shakespeare’s complete works to mild hallucinogens, the end result would be something like Galician director Lois Patiño’s Ariel [+see also:
interview: Lois Patiño
film profile]. Exchanging the Eastern philosophy of his spiritual travelogue Samsara [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Lois Patiño
film profile] for some of the most canonical works of Western narrative, Patiño similarly captures a fluidity of personas, environments and embodied states, encapsulated by two halves of a shot of undulating, purple waves attempting to flip open like pages, or curtains under a proscenium arch. Otherwise, it’s ultimately less provocative than his acclaimed last feature, the many lively annotations on its source material not amounting to a powerful overall thesis. The film enjoyed a low-key premiere last weekend in IFFR’s Harbour section.
Having co-developed the idea with Argentinian Shakespeare-on-film enthusiast Matías Piñeiro, Patiño slightly betrays the spirit of his collaborator’s fine-grained variations on the Bard’s less-celebrated texts (many of which premiered and found acclaim in competition at Locarno). Here, we’re in omnibus Shakespeare territory or, if we’re feeling uncharitable, the current notion of the shared “cinematic universe”: with The Tempest being the writer’s final and most self-reflexive play, Patiño re-fashions it as a gateway into all of his previous work, with Hamlet, Romeo and Lear existing in perpetuity on the magician Prospero’s island of exile.
The director enlists Argentinian actress Agustina Muñoz (a Piñeiro repertory company player) as the focalising character; playing a close version of herself, she arrives on the Azores in the mid-Atlantic, where she’ll play the key role of the air spirit Ariel in a local production of The Tempest. But as she takes a ferry to Faial, a smaller portion of the archipelago, she begins to notice several bizarre occurrences: all of the passengers are collectively put under a sleeping spell, and the island’s inhabitants exclusively converse in Shakespeare quotes once she disembarks. The pier’s Tannoy system also contributes some blank verse, incongruously recalling the bickering PA announcers in the comedy Airplane!.
At its most effective and beguiling, the folding of fragments of the most deathless phrases in the English language (translated here into Portuguese and Spanish, of course) becomes a silky counterpart to Patiño’s facility for visuals; otherwise, this surrealistic conceit feels at once unmotivated and a bit tame, as if it were a secondary-school teacher’s gentle introduction to this forbidding canonical figurehead, or a Disneyland ride where the carriage stops briefly at Hamlet performing “To be or not to be” or Romeo and Juliet’s final death sequence, before abruptly whisking you away.
Still, Ariel’s playful control of tone and fluid spatial transitions across the mountainous island always keep you wondering what exactly Patiño is planning and might unveil around every corner, or indeed if he’ll furnish an eventual coup de cinema like Samsara’s closed-eyed bardo transformation. He boldly and endearingly tries to match Shakespeare’s linguistic play with his own unique gifts for enchantment and disorientation, when even the best previous cinematic interpreters can feel restrained by the demands of fidelity and accuracy. The timeless resonance of captive mythological “muses”, like Ariel herself, also comes through, expressing that their bestowing of inspiration is not the sole, individualistic property of “creator” figures like Prospero, Shakespeare or, indeed, Patiño.
Ariel is a co-production by Spain and Portugal, staged by Filmika Galaika and Bando à Parte. Its international sales are courtesy of Lights On.
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