There are a number of ways in which a young filmmaker might make a splash with a new movie — sex, violence, mumbling. Adapting Elizabethan-era drama, however, does not usually rank high on the list. But, for a number of years, Shakespeare’s comedies have been the prime obsession of the 32-year-old Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro.
On Thursday, Mr. Piñeiro’s latest feature, “The Princess of France,” was set to open the Concorso Internazionale at the 67th Locarno Film Festival in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, which runs through Aug. 16. Founded in 1946 with a slate including Roberto Rossellini’s “Rome, Open City,” the lakeside event is one of the oldest film festivals in Europe after Cannes and Venice. Under the artistic director Carlo Chatrian, and before him Olivier Père, its programming has become a vital home for innovative cinema, with this year’s filmmakers including Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz and Jean-Marie Straub.
Like Mr. Piñeiro’s previous two films “Rosalinda” and “Viola,” which reworked “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night,” respectively, “The Princess of France” borrows from Shakespeare. (All of the films are in Spanish.)
The story focuses on a young man (Julián Larquier Tellarini) who is assembling a radio play based on “Love’s Labour’s Lost” while challenges simultaneously pile up in his own love life. The film is set in Mr. Piñeiro’s familiar milieu of young, restless, Bohemian, middle-class Argentine men and women in and around a Buenos Aires preoccupied with artistic and romantic pursuits. They chattily and drolly circle one another around town (and on stage).
Before “The Princess of France” was screened at Locarno, the Cinema Guild, which also distributed “Viola,” announced that it had acquired it U.S. distribution rights to the film.
In describing Mr. Piñeiro’s work, as part of a feature last fall on 20 young directors to watch, the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott wrote, “the strivings of the young are filtered through a lively literary sensibility and a precise and elegant visual style.” This style, at once contemporary and classical in its light-footed approach, is reflected in his latest work too.
The basic motif, according to Mr. Piñeiro, has to do with enjoying how people talk. “Talking in a nonnaturalistic way, taking words with a certain density, and playing with them as if they were clay,” he said, speaking in English over lunch recently in New York, in a conversation that ranged in reference points from “King Lear” to “Showgirls.”
Mr. Piñeiro began his career studying filmmaking at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires. He thought at first about entering film criticism (and earlier still, studying mathematics), but he enjoyed shooting films for class. After further studies in literature, he made his first feature, “The Stolen Man,” in 2007, which showed at a selection of festivals worldwide.
Mr. Piñeiro, who now lives in New York but returns regularly to Buenos Aires, has supported himself recently through teaching Spanish and a writing scholarship at New York University, and before that he had a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Financing his films has involved what he calls a “Frankenstein” mix of independent funding, earnings from “Viola,” work-in-progress grants and equipment often provided by his Buenos Aires film school. For “Rosalinda,” he even had logistical help from his mother, a midwife, who moonlighted as a driver and producer and received a screen credit.
The premiere of “The Princess of France” at Locarno comes a year after “Viola” had an acclaimed theatrical run in New York as well as screenings internationally. At only 65 minutes, “Viola” moved between a troupe rehearsing a performance of “Twelfth Night” and a young woman (María Villar) working for a DVD pirating service. Art and life blurred into one another as their paths intersected in a playful and mysterious way.
Mr. Piñeiro’s new film feels more grounded but also taps into the intricate plotting and quicksilver language of Shakespeare. (It opens by listing a traditional dramatis personae on screen.) Mr. Piñeiro is friends with many of his actors and attributes his interest in Shakespeare to exposure to their work in theater. (Three years ago, he directed a theater project in Buenos Aires, “And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again,” that was a pastiche of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and other plays.)
He said that a series of recent translations of Shakespeare by Latin American poets had also helped make the plays feel closer to him, because they were written in the Spanish of Latin America rather than that of Spain.
“It was Spanish I could relate to, with no footnotes, just a direct relationship with the text. Then of course I put my hands into it — it isn’t absolutely their translation,” said the filmmaker. For a future project, he said he would like to try translating Shakespeare himself “from scratch.”
His recent forays into film combine an air of youthful flirtation with the sophisticated artifice of his source texts. In “The Princess of France,” he takes inspiration from the premise of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” — the King of Navarre and three of his courtiers make a pact to swear off women, which inevitably falls apart when the Princess of France and her ladies pay a visit — to inform the movie’s complex mix of viewpoints. The film is roughly divided into chapters, each featuring a woman with some claim on the protagonist’s attentions.
Despite the romantic intrigue in his films, a measured tone distinguishes Mr. Piñeiro’s work. “Nothing very dramatic ever happens in a Piñeiro film,” wrote the Argentine film critic Quintín, “which puts him definitively outside of any sort of mainstream — even the festival mainstream, which in recent years has been oriented to the intense or even the gruesome, especially when it comes to Latin American cinema.”
“I think that I like a certain balance where nothing is too dramatic and nothing is too trivial,” Mr. Piñeiro said. “It is like Ozu,” he added, referring to the Japanese master of chamber drama. “Even though he’s very different, he also likes this idea of not putting too much drama in what he’s telling. He has these marriages and you never see the marriage.”
Mr. Piñeiro’s recent Shakespeare films were not his first literary efforts: “The Stolen Man,” his 2007 debut, and “They All Lie” (2009) drew inspiration from texts by the 19th-century Argentine reformer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. “The Princess of France” will be followed by a variation on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”: “Hermia and Helena,” named after two of that play’s characters, is scheduled for shooting in November.
While his past films have been notable for their female leads, “The Princess of France” centers on the radio-play director played by Mr. Tellarini. Ms. Villar and Agustina Muñoz also appear.
Mr. Piñeiro’s casually sophisticated films have placed him in the company of other inventive storytellers from his country such as Lisandro Alonso (“Jauja”), Mariano Llinás (“Extraordinary Stories”) and Lucrecia Martel (“The Headless Woman”).
Another filmmaker, and close friend and contemporary, Alejo Moguillansky (“The Parrot and the Swan”), edits Mr. Piñeiro’s films, and shares something of his sensibility.
“We like the idea of narrative films which are fiction but play on other levels that appreciate the musicality that film can have,” Mr. Piñeiro said. “A musicality of forms.”