- A few of Piñeiro’s mysterious women
On Sunday at 7 PM Doc Films will present the Chicago premiere of the 2012 Argentinian film Viola as part of their superb series of recent Central and South American cinema. It’s a curious film, starting out as a breezy, dialogue-driven comedy before growing increasingly mysterious and ending up in the realm of paranoid fantasy. Writer-director Matias Piñeiro (who’s made six movies since 2006) handles these shifts in tone so subtly that you might not recognize them until after they’ve occurred. The unrushed vibe is especially impressive considering the movie is only an hour long. “Piñeiro arrives here with what seems to be a fully developed style and distinct set of interests,” J. Hoberman wrote last summer on the occasion of the first New York retrospective of his work. “Set in a vague urban bohemian milieu, [his films] evoke Jacques Rivette or early Raul Ruiz in their elaborate, literary conspiracy games and Eric Rohmer in their fondness for talkative young people.”
