John Osburn
There is a scene halfway into the film, in which its women are sitting before microphones, around a table in a darkened room, reading from the play, that is one of the most lyrical Shakespearean sequences I've seen on film, a chamber comedy in the key of chance.THE PRINCESS OF France is, as a piece, like that, music and allusion more than plot. Piñeiro grasps the poetics of repetition, filming one scene, not of the play, but of the actors' lives, three times, before finding a strand to pull forward. Love's Labour's Lost is heard only in parts, suggestive and incomplete. How it reflects the lives of the young people who play the roles in it isn't spelled out, but they live in a world in which it exists, vibrantly. Shakespeare's story is about men who have foresworn women; it seems, if anything, to be the opposite in the lives of Piñeiro's actors. They emerge as a sort of generational portrait, of the smart and talented seeking a way by art through a world of scant possibility. READ MORE: http://osburnt.com/the-princess-of-France/
