Tu Me Abrazas. You Burn Me. Sappho’s fleeting call, her three word poem, revived once more by the ambitious Matías Piñeiro. In fragments; Piñeiro’s You Burn Me (2024) potently ruminates upon death, desire, passion, love and legacy, throughout this beautifully captured essayistic drama. The film shot on 16mm using a Bolex camera, is adapted from a chapter of Cesare Pavese’s 1947 Dialoghi con Leucò which imagines an encounter between infamous lovers Sappho and Britomartis who ultimately fling themselves into the ocean. You Burn Me muses on Sappho’s poetry and legacy, through the gaze of a nameless character. As she wanders through various scenes and galleries she annotates poems and contemplates art and its connection to the world around her. We are not sure if this character is the director, if they are us, if this film is a story or about real life, but this confusion is fascinating. With this, the film meanders through our minds, exhibiting a strangely nostalgic quality captured through its analogue film medium. It is a beautiful viewing experience that encases you in its sensuality and captivating visuals.
Through this epic banality, our senses are engaged and we are immersed in this story of Sappho. Piñeiro expressed in an interview that he made this film “to find out who [he] was as a filmmaker [...]” and that “[...] the attraction to do something different was magnetic”. This magnetism is echoed throughout the film as we are pulled into a seductive world of rhythmic visuals, a symphony of sound, colours, poetry and art, with the ocean at its core. Piñeiro effortlessly explores themes of birth and death and their connection to the ocean – a fertile place of birth that also embodies the life cycle and an end to mortality. The focality of a watery demise emphasising destiny, is beautifully juxtaposed with pastiche sequences of buildings, books, art, museum, birds, skies, water, words, nature floating amongst one another. I was particularly interested in Piñeiro’s use of what I’ve coined ‘Hieroglyph poems’. These are shots cut to a corresponding word of Sappho’s short poems which are repeated over and over again, revealing to us a new language...or perhaps just a forgotten one. I found these fascinating, and commend Piñeiro’s adept cultivation of the language of film, a most striking aspect of the highly conceptual ‘You Burn Me’.
On another note, the film allows for what Piñeiro identifies as a “profound sense of presence”
which is seen through its editing. This invites us to ruminate upon many simplistic yet beautiful images cut together in meditation, gliding over you like the tides. The use of various elongated shots lingers on words and poems and the ocean asks us to be a part of its rhythm. We are drawn back to the sense of presence required to create art, the sense of presence Piñeiro and his crew felt creating this film. ‘You Burn Me’ is predominantly a film about desire, but also loss and melancholia, as it mourns Sappho’s ‘still-lost’ poems and other lost art. However, it also leaves us with some shred of hope. Towards the end of the film we see the words; “Just as new poems were found in 2014, it is probably and quite plausible that in the near future other still-lost poems will be recovered and thus can be memorised again”. It reminds us that nothing is truly lost, knowledge and love are most powerful and will return to us like messages in bottles once tossed into the sea. As the film comes to a close we are left with a final message from its filmmakers; “I say goodbye to you dreaming up one of these future poems”. A striking thought that left me inspired to dream up my own new poems, to devour all the art that is around me, in galleries and scattered amongst the streets.
I rarely find myself so deeply immersed in a film’s artistic capabilities.It's a pity I wasn’t able to watch it in the cinema or at a MIFF screening as this is a film that must be experienced in the present surrounded by other film lovers. I can only hope that others seek to experience it. ‘You Burn Me’ demands your full attention, and due to its essay-like, ponderous quality this is sometimes difficult to surrender to. It is rich, and although I found it incredibly beautiful, it did at times feel dense. It is not a film you watch for entertainment but rather to experience it deeply. At times I would describe it as a pretentious cinephile’s fever dream. But overall, the film seduced me, and encouraged me to create more art, writing, poetry, to appreciate film and dare to dream of future poems, unfound or reborn in a language long lost. You Burn Me is a necessary watch for those who appreciate film as not only pretty images but as a language. It is for those who seek to experience art and to think deeply about poetry’s greatest ideas. It is for those who long to be reinspired, reborn, those who long for a muse. Thus, through his powerful artwork, Piñeiro has reignited my passion for the sensual lover that is cinema.