Starring Agustina Muñoz. In English and Spanish, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Argentine writer-director Matías Piñeiro is a small-scale artisan in the vein of American mumblecore makers like Joe Swanberg and the Duplass brothers, albeit with less comedy and more cerebral content. His previous features, The Princess of France and Viola, looked at the creative and romantic travails of theatre groups putting Shakespeare on stage and radio. Here, he continues his Bardic interests, if only tangentially, by following a Buenos Aires woman to New York, where a paid residency has her translating A Midsummer Night’s Dream into Spanish.

This would-be theatre director is neither Hermia nor Helena (names from that famous comedy), but Camila, played by Piñeiro regular Agustina Muñoz. She has left behind a passel of pals and a steady boyfriend to hit Manhattan in winter. There, she meets a variety of moderately interesting people and gets entangled with several men, including a lanky filmmaker (Dustin Guy Defa)—although radical jumps in the time frame make you question this sequence of events.

The film’s stylistic quirks are its best parts, with handwritten Shakespeare superimposed on a solarized image of Camila’s face or that New York filmmaker reading Daphne du Maurier over his (highly pretentious) experimental short. Muñoz has some screen charisma, but most of the actors are painfully amateurish and the hello-how-are-you dialogue is prosaic to the point of boredom anyway. These privileged people, mostly edging into their 30s and still wondering what to do with their lives, seem to have endless amounts of time to ponder their options.

The lack of spark, artistic or sexual, between characters makes for a monotonously dragged-out visit, even at less than 90 minutes. The film hints at parallels with Shakespeare, but these remain elusively decorative. Still, H&H has its charms, including a poignant ragtime-piano score and the director’s acute choices of physical detail—a pair of gloves, an inscribed book, a well-worn suitcase—in two contrasting countries. There’s definitely some inspiration here for budding storytellers. Hopefully, they would take these ideas and add some genuine emotion. Plus acting.