You Burn Me: Matías Piñeiro’s evocative, essayistic exploration of Sappho

The contemporary reputation of the Greek poet Sappho rests largely on a collection of fragments. ‘Ode to Aphrodite’ is the only one of her works that is known to be complete, having been copied and preserved in a treatise on composition, and from the rest of her reputedly expansive oeuvre we only have around 650 context-free snippets, some of which consist of just a single line. One of these lines, known as Fragment 38, simply reads, “You burn me.”

The figure of Sappho is central to Matías Piñeiro’s You Burn Me. He gets to her through the Italian writer Cesare Pavese, whose 1947 book Dialoghi con Leucò imagines a conversation between Sappho and the nymph Britomartis. This is a conversation Pavese posits as taking place in the sea where both women jumped to their deaths, but Piñeiro has the words spoken by his regular collaborators Gabi Saidón (as Sappho) and María Villar (Britomartis) as they go about their day, occasionally reworking the thoughts of these ancient Greek figures as WhatsApp exchanges.

Piñeiro has spent more than a decade immersed in the world of Shakespeare, with all of his films since 2011’s Rosalinda using one of the Bard’s plays as a jumping-off point for an exploration of (mostly female) relationships and the way we engage with art. The shift in focus to a poet with a less complete corpus has necessitated a more fragmented, essayistic approach, and much of You Burn Me is constructed from cutaways to shots of locations, objects and books that are then pieced together under a voiceover (by Agustina Muñoz) reading from Pavese, Sappho, Natalia Ginzburg and others. There is often a jarring disconnect between what is being seen and what is heard, but through his rhythmic editing Piñeiro creates his own kind of poetry, linking certain images to words through repetition, before letting these shots stand alone as an evocation of the spoken word.

There is something satisfyingly tactile about You Burn Me, from the flickering warmth of the images captured on a 16mm Bolex by Tomás Paula Marques, to the sight of Piñeiro annotating and underlining his books; it is as if we are watching him figure out connections as he studies these texts, making a new discovery with the turning of each page. There are occasions when it feels like Piñeiro has digressed down a blind alley or has presented allusions that are frustratingly opaque, but for the majority of its 64-minute running time this is a disarming and stimulating film to experience. In both form and content, You Burn Me may mark the start of an intriguing new direction for this filmmaker. 

► You Burn Me is an ICA release, playing in select UK cinemas now.