A boat on which everyone is asleep. An actress who arrives in the Azores to join a theatrical tour of The Tempest, but finds something unexpected and magical instead. The whole island is a stage and all of Shakespeare’s plays are performed throughout the day. The world of the movie merges with the world of the play and with the real world and we immerse ourselves in this poetic and metatextual game.
How many adaptations — modern, post-modern, contemporary — are there of Shakespeare? One of the most adapted authors, known by those who have never seen his work, his name is an adjective and, at the same time, a trigger for a list of plays whose titles we know by heart: The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and many others. Lois Patiño, who brought us Samsara in 2023, once again brings us a bucolic film, with a cadence that is not far from the languid waves of a tide at sunset. The film plays with ideas of performance, of who is the actor and who is the character, and what exists in the real world and in the world of the narrative, whether they touch and merge or are totally watertight. Here the narrative leaps into life and reality is fiction. In this movie Agustina Muñoz is Agustina Muñoz and Irene Escolar is Ariel, a character from The Tempest, but she is also Irene Escolar and she is also the character Ariel from Lois Patño’s Ariel. Don’t worry, it will all make sense when you see the movie.
Ana Cabral Martins
