You Burn Me review – Sappho and suffering in a macabre

This hour-long reverie from Argentinian film-maker Matías Piñeiro offers chilling insight into the agonies of unrequited love

The three words “you burn me” are a surviving fragment (or micro-poem) by Sappho, and make up the title of this hour-long reverie from the Argentinian film-maker Matías Piñeiro, a multilayered essay or dramatised exchange musing on the nature of death, desire and love. It is, in fact, an adaptation of the chapter Sea Foam from the Italian author Cesare Pavese’s 1947 volume Dialogues With Leucò, which imagines conversations between mythic figures.

This film shows us a dialogue between Sappho (supposed by unreliable romantic myth to have thrown herself into the Ionian sea in the anguish of heartbreak) and the goddess Britomartis, who is imagined to have plunged into the water to escape the pursuit of a man. So they are the exact opposites: in them desire runs in opposite directions. The movie also reflects on the unhappy story of Pavese, a poet, novelist and antifascist from Turin, who experienced depression and took his own life in the city’s Hotel Roma, with a copy of his book on him. He was reportedly devastated after being rejected by Hollywood actor Constance Dowling – who was in turn dejected by her affair with (the married) Elia Kazan. And so the daisy chain of unhappiness continues.