Having enjoyed considerably another of Matías Piñeiro's movies (Viola, 2012) I gave a try to Hermia & Helena. I was disappointed. This film deals with the professional and personal world of several female characters, principally Camila and her friend Carmen. Carmen (María Villar) has spent a year in New York supported by a fellowship to carry out an (unexplained) project that didn't pan out. She returns to Buenos Aires at the same time her friend Camila (Agustina Muñoz) is about to travel to New York to undertake another project under the same fellowship, a Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Carmen and Camila swap their New York and Buenos Aires apartments. Then Carmen disappears from the tale and the rest of the movie is about Camila, her project (that seems to move at a snail's pace) and, mainly, her shifting romantic connections both in New York and in Buenos Aires.

The problem: the tale is told in disjointed episodes and acted in a cold and sometimes perfunctory way. Muñoz and Villar are first rate actresses and were very charismatic in Viola, where conversations had the rythhm and feel of real talk. Here, they are sometimes given stilted and unnatural lines (especially in English). And there are forced attempts at artsiness such as transitions New York - Buenos Aires marked by unsteady images of a New York bridge combined with Argentinian trees. Is this what one sees on the way to the airport in each city?

There is, however, an intensely moving last scene where Camila confronts warily but warmly the father she never knew. In spite of this and other positives, Hermia & Helena doesn't fulfill expectations.

Hermia & Helena are two pining lovers in Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' and that's about the last you'll hear of them in this film about a gaggle of arty 20-somethings rattling between fellowships in New York and home in Buenos Aires. We can't really follow their non-adventures because of the non-existent plot and the long baffling flashbacks. Not that we care. Camila and pals are uncommitted to anything much and they never develop, not even when Camila meets for the first time her father, who abandoned her mother during pregnancy. Their meeting is bland and fruitless; neither notices. There's Style by the long ton, though: a disorienting opening with people flitting in and out of the frame at close range; bits of Shakespeare's text, complete with translator's notes, pasted on screen; big close-ups (the one of the man eating a glazed doughnut is given meaning by overheard cellphone conversations); and like that. A loud ragtime-piano score kept me awake through most of this failed undergraduate film-school project.

Dedicated to Ozu star Setsuko Hara, Argentine director Matias Piñeiro's Hermia and Helena follows his three previous films, "Viola," "The Princess of France", and "Rosalinda," with a work depicting characters loosely based on female heroines in William Shakespeare's comedies. Shot in Buenos Aires and partly in New York, the film centers on Camila (Agustina Muñoz, "The Princess of France"),a Buenos Aires theater director, who has been invited to New York to translate Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" into Spanish and then go back to Argentina to rehearse. According to Piñeiro, "It is a film about coming and going, about changing states, changing languages and sounds." Inspired by his own experience in New York where he came on a fellowship in the arts, Piñeiro shifts the focus from a high energy fast-talking beginning in Buenos Aires to a more laid back thoughtful mood in New York. Camilla is in New York to replace Carmen (Maria Villar, "The Princess of France"),a friend from Buenos Aires, in the institute as well as in her rental apartment. Like the two young women in Shakespeare's play, Camila and her friend share relationships in a sequence of vignettes that take place over the course of a year. Divided into chapters bearing the names of the characters featured in the episode such as "Carmen & Camila," "Camila & Danièle," "Gregg & Camila," and so on, the film is enhanced by a spirited piano score.

Piñeiro manages to keep things light and the sequences have a playful feeling in keeping with the spirit of the Shakespeare play. Camilla begins where Carmen left off, picking up on her relationship with hipster Yank Lukas (Keith Poulson, "Little Sister") and local filmmaker Gregg (Dustin Guy Defa) who shows one of his short films made from footage of a 1940's black and white film with a voice-over based on Du Maurier's Rebecca. There is an enigmatic relationship with Daniele (Mati Diop, "Fort Buchanan"),another member of the institute, who has been traveling in the mid-west and who sends Camila post-cards from the cities she visits that Camila hangs on a map on her wall. Flashbacks to Buenos Aires also include Carmen's boyfriend Leo (Julian Larquier Tellarini, "Terror 5").

The film is about movement, from one place to another and from one relationship to another but the characters and their relationships remain undeveloped. Piñeiro jumps from sequence to sequence without staying long enough for us to get to know them as human beings. Though the episodes are labeled "one month earlier," "three months earlier," and so forth, the flashbacks are confusing as to time and place and are difficult to follow. If we are left uninvolved in Camila's various attempts at personal connection up to this point, we are definitely engaged in her search for a deeper experience that leads to a reunion with Horace (Dan Sallitt, "Honeymoon"),the estranged American father whom she had never met.

Though Hermia's father Egeus in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a demanding parent who insists that she marry Demetrius and forego marrying her love for Lysander, Horace is not Hermia's authoritarian father but the reverse. In a visit to his home in upstate New York, the two exchange a series of intimate questions, playing a game of you ask, I tell, then vice versa. The conversation maintains a tone of civility and we get a more rounded picture of Camila but the film drifts slowly but noticeably into melancholy.

Piñeiro has said about Hermia and Helena that, "Many plot elements remain somewhat hidden. Instead, you focus on the atmosphere that springs from the characters' encounters with each other." While the atmosphere is always present for us to focus on, the "somewhat hidden" elements of the plot border on obscurity and ultimately detract from our ability to understand the characters. According to the director, "Not everything is connected to everything." This was also true in my experience.