[yasr_overall_rating]
An inspector hunts down Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, who becomes a fugitive in his home country in the late 1940s for joining the Communist Party.
“Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”
– An excerpt from Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines) by Pablo Neruda (Translated by W.S. Merwin).
Pablo Neruda – “the greatest poet of the 20th Century in any language,” according to Gabriel García Márquez – led a tumultuous, extravagant, wildly romantic life. A senator for the Chilean Communist Party, Neruda had to flee his homeland after the regime was outlawed in the late 1940s, escaping through perilous mountains – on a horse! – to Argentina. His poetry deemed offensive, Neruda himself labeled a traitor, he could only return home years later. In 1971, Pablo Neruda won a Nobel Prize for Literature; two years later he died in his native Chile. A complex, sardonic, deeply affectionate man, he led a passionate life; director Pablo Larraín’s “Neruda” is as poetic, surreal and eloquent as its prolific titular character.
Though he’s worked on countless projects, Larraín is arguably most notable for the Gael García Bernal starrer, political satire “No,” where Bernal played an ad exec going after Chilean president Augusto Pinochet. This time the chameleon-like actor appears as Óscar Peluchonneau, a Prefect who doesn’t read much poetry and whose name reflects his bloated personality, sent on a mission to “catch and humiliate Pablo Neruda.” Desperate – and unable to – understand the artist, his poetry and motivations, Peluchonneau is deeply envious of his nemesis, as he has no clearly-defined identity of his own – except striving to live up to his esteemed father’s reputation. Driven by this jealousy, awe and bitterness, but also by a canine-like perseverance, Óscar will stop at nothing to capture the poet.
But Bernal, while melancholic, funny, despicable and sympathetic in equal measures, wisely takes a step back to let the star of the show, Mr. Luis Gnecco as Pablo Neruda, shine. And shine he does, lighting every scene in more nuanced colors than the brilliant cinematographer Sergio Armstrong (who has worked with the director on “No”). Both Gnecco and Larraín portray the artist as a fantasist, to whom the entire dangerous escape from Chilean authorities is wildly exciting, another elaborate verse in the artist’s glamorized existence, one in which the Prefect, and his girlfriend, and the authorities are all romanticized characters. A man whose pen “has the ability to change a thousand minds,” Pablo never loses sight of his sense of humor. When told that 300 policemen are after him, an intoxicated Neruda remarks, “That’s quite a lot, isn’t it?” At another point he states, “You think exiling us will help? No. You have to kill us.”
His personality too large to be confined in cramped apartments, (“Neruda is a man of bare land and eagles, not of mattresses…”), Pablo seeks solace in brothels, parties where he dresses as Lawrence of Arabia, and provoking scandal by badmouthing the new president – until he finally decides to go for the border. His partner – and later, for a brief time, wife – Delia Del Carril (a perfectly-calibrated performance from Mercedes Morán), stays by the genius, through all the infidelities and borderline-abusive behavior (“Kill yourself, Delia,” Pabloa spits in her face at one point. “That way I’ll write about you for another 20 years”), basking in his adventurous spirit.
Apart from being an incisive character study, Larraín’s stunner of a film plays like a thriller, such as in the tense sequence, where 30 poems are distributed anonymously, one of them sent to – and later publicly read by – Pablo Picasso himself; or in the final, lyrical mountainous escape scene. It plays like an acute indictment of the suppression of the freedom of speech and creative expression, with numerous portrayals of the horrid conditions of the Chilean Communist camps. It plays like a comedy: Peluchonneau thinks he’s seduced Neruda’s bitter wife, only to be proved very wrong when she publicly professes her admiration of the artist instead of condemning him (“He’s not a traitor, he’s very kind. He owes me a lot of money, but he’s a great man.”) It plays like a metaphysical exploration of art itself, the impact it can have culturally, socially, politically, personally, breaking the fourth wall subtly, such as when Óscar whines, “I’m not a supporting character!” We all are either leaders or supporting characters; we either lay in the shadows or bask in the sun – and sometimes it’s impossible to escape the shadows.
“Neruda” celebrates life, love, music, the art of storytelling – poetry’s impact specifically, but it also challenges the norms of narrative structure through it’s “mostly-linear-sometimes-fragmented” structure, mirroring Pablo’s writing – and it’s filled with stunning prose, courtesy of screenwriter Guillermo Calderón. That’s how you write a script, folks. Surely to be a contender for the Academy Awards this year, “Neruda” is a cinematic poem worth reciting over and over.
In select theaters December 16th
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