tú me abrasas

An adaptation of Sea Foam, a chapter of Cesare Pavese’s Dialoghi con Leucò in which the Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomart talk of desire and death, while also imagining its potential footnotes and detours.

Tú me abrasas marks a turning point in the work of Matías Piñeiro and in how he approaches the adaptation of literary texts. After a series of fiction films inspired by female characters in the work of Shakespeare, the Argentinian filmmaker takes on a visual poem, or perhaps an essay, following a two-layered reading which draws on Cesare Pavese’s own approach to Sappho in Dialogues with Leucò. In a chapter centred on the ancient Greek poet’s relationship with the nymph Britomart, “Sea Foam,” Pavese paints a picture of the two discussing love and death by the sea. The film draws on the fragmentary nature of Sappho’s poems as we know them, and on the intertwining suicides of its main protagonists: unrequited love allegedly drove Sappho to throw herself into the sea, while Britomart is said to have fallen off a cliff while running away from a man, and Pavese took his own life in a Turin hotel room. The result is a film that is at once dense and light-footed, sombre and playful, sweeping viewers into a dance of translation and memory that manages to create a sense of contemporaneity and to salvage a work of art surrounded by death. The familiar faces that serve as transient embodiments of Sappho and Britomart, already seen in Piñeiro’s previous films, bring together fragments of life in New York, in Spain, and in Greece, museum visits and walks around cities. Like froth on a wave, they come to the surface before dissolving again, in a synesthetic and mnemotechnic movement. In adapting Pavese, Piñeiro also adapts history’s footnotes and gaps, various layers of reading feeding into each other in a continuous creation of new forms.

Antoine Thirion