Starring Raffaele Pinto. In Spanish, Italian, and Catalan, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Art as analogue for life and life using art to cover its designs are among the heady, if sometimes carnal, themes of The Academy of Muses, a uniquely provocative film from Spain’s José Luis Guerín.

The nonprofessional yet thoroughly engaging cast is led by Raffaele Pinto, a real-life Italian professor of philology at the University of Barcelona whose unnamed character teaches a course at that institution exploring the role of muses in premodern literature. Moving freely between languages, his mostly female, moderately youngish students have much to add on the subject, built loosely around Dante’s Inferno. Everyone in the course, including Il Professore, is articulately opposed to the patriarchy. And yet things always seem to work out in his favour.

What initially appears to be mere documentation of a lively academic discussion soon grows more personal, and more formally quirky, as it becomes apparent that the Neapolitan medievalist, though scruffily (late) middle-aged himself, might be getting overly amused by one or more of his estudiantes. At least that’s the suspicion you pick up from his wife (Rosa Delor Muns), usually shot facing forward, through their apartment window, while the balding, bespectacled prof dithers distractedly in the background. Indeed, what he describes as “research” extends to private meetings, especially with a sparky Italian (Emanuela Forgetta) and a strawberry-blond Spaniard (Mireia Iniesta). They are again glimpsed through—and obscured by—reflection-dappled car and café windows.

While the director obviously enjoys mediating his verbose subjects’ lives through cinematic distancing devices, he also mixes in more direct experiences, such as a quick visit to Sardinia, where local singers and poets suggest (and debate) the primacy of nature. The overall effect, although somewhat repetitive and not always polished-looking, develops into a highly stimulating discourse. Some of the human comedy you could even call divine.