You Burn Me Review: Matías Piñeiro Muses on Sapphic Fragments and Unrequited Love

In You Burn Me, the Argentinian littérateur-filmmaker Matías Piñeiro uses his vintage Bolex camera like the iOS Notes app. Shooting over the course of a few years, his method involved “collecting” images here and there amidst teaching jobs on two continents, and in real locations referenced in the texts he’s adapting, as well as places imitating them. Whilst his work has always contended with classical literary texts’ relevance in the present day, his latest meditates more urgently on film form, specifically how the 16mm-shot and co-op-made ’60s avant-garde canon can be modernized. Like Sappho’s Ancient Greek poetry––his other principal concern here––his rushes need to be represented as countless, gleaming fragments, with a sprawling file database subbing for the poet’s parchment. 

All of which is to say there’s a productive tension when Piñeiro attempts to fashion his literary sources into cinema: never just acted-out physically or maintained through voice-over, the focus is always on using native cinematic grammar (images, découpage) to imitate the sensual and semantic aspects of language. Looking at Sappho’s evocative phrasing (most likely written in the fifth century BC, and here translated by Anne Carson), the three syllables making up “you burn me” have clearly left Piñeiro pondering a cinematic analogue for their clipped eloquence. 

Although Piñeiro’s Shakespeare films of the 2010s (e.g. Viola and Hermia & Helena) were dense and allusive themselves, he achieves greater structural complexity in You Burn Me by using the Italian anti-fascist author Cesare Pavese’s mythological works as a framing device to access Sappho’s sparer writings. Anglophone cinephiles may recognize Pavese as a primary source for Straub-Huillet, and in their spirit, Piñeiro sets to find a rigorous cinematic language for his 1947 text Dialogues With Leucò, specifically the chapter “Sea Foam,” an imagined interaction between Sappho and the mountain nymph Britomartis, both of whom apocryphally committed suicide by drowning. When Pavese also committed suicide in 1950, in a hotel in his home city of Turin, he left his final words on a copy of this very book. 

With the director’s repertory mainstay Agustina Muñoz playing an unseen filmmaker musing in voice-over on a potential adaptation of “Sea Foam,” we see its component parts slowly congealing with her commentary overlaid. Piñeiro regulars Gabriela Saidón and María Villar will incarnate Sappho and Britomartis respectively in present times, yet in the sea-swashed Mediterranean climes not unlike their characters several millennia ago; more elusively, María Inês Gonçalves plays a biology student in another romantic panic, as we accompany her gazing at classical artifacts in a museum, which provide further authentic visualization of Sappho’s world. All of editor Gerard Borràs’ quick-cutting and inter-threaded density mimics the associations that fly into our head when reading, and the more intricate scholarly work if we choose to study and properly parse these texts, with translations between Spanish, Italian, the Aeolian dialect of Ancient Greek, and good old English necessary for full meaning to emerge.

Some of Piñeiro’s dialectical connections can be more comprehensible to him than us, and while he has the self-motivated independence and literary acumen of his major influence Hong Sangsoo, the South Korean director’s own DIY opuses have more universal resonance, and it is easier to reach their emotional wavelength. Still, You Burn Me cements Piñeiro as having one of the most far-reaching imaginations in current experimental film, beckoning us to follow even if he’s many intellectual steps ahead.

You Burn Me is now in limited release.

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