Hermia & Helena

Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro's Hermia & Helena continues his direction of contemporary stories linked to Shakespeare's heroines, in this case the love-crossed women from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Loosely, the filmmaker's protagonists, Camila and Carmen, share love objects the way Shakespeare's Hermia and Helena do—Camila loves Lukas, Carmen's old boyfriend, and Carmen has her eye on Leo, Camila's old lover.

Cities, centuries, cultures, crushes and characters from Shakespeare intertwine in a story inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream. Camila is an art exchange student drifting between Buenos Aires and New York.

Dedicated to Ozu star Setsuko Hara, Argentine director Matias Piñeiro's Hermia and Helena follows his three previous films, "Viola," "The Princess of France", and "Rosalinda," with a work depicting characters loosely based on female heroines in William Shakespeare's comedies. Shot in Buenos Aires and partly in New York, the film centers on Camila (Agustina Muñoz, "The Princess of France"), a Buenos Aires theater director, who has been invited to New York to translate Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" into Spanish and then go back to Argentina to rehearse.

Hermia & Helena are two pining lovers in Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' and that's about the last you'll hear of them in this film about a gaggle of arty 20-somethings rattling between fellowships in New York and home in Buenos Aires. We can't really follow their non-adventures because of the non-existent plot and the long baffling flashbacks.

I just saw this film last night. At first I was going to praise the director for his ambitious decision to cast androids in every single role, but then I came to and realized that I had just watched the flattest, most emotionally antiseptic, charisma-free inconsequentiality ever committed to screen.