The new film”Neruda” mixes fact and poetry
By hola | Published | No Comments
Chilean film-maker Pablo Larrain has called his new movie, “Neruda,” an anti-biopic. It plays with fragments from the life of iconic Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, to compose a poetic story filled with fantasy and dark humor that captures the complexities of the man and his political legacy.
The film—Chile’s submission for the best foreign-language film at next February’s Academy Awards—proves once again that Pablo Larrain is one of Chile’s greatest filmmakers. He also directed “Post Mortem”, “No”, and “Jackie,” the movie about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that is currently in cinemas nationwide.
“Neruda” is set in Chile in 1948, a few years after World War II and during presidency of Gabriel Gonzalez-Videla. Gonzalez-Videla has abandoned his leftist supporters, outlawing the communist party. He orders the capture of Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco), a well-known leftist writer and politician at the time, who had publicly condemned Gonzalez-Videla’s government. Neruda finds himself escaping from authorities along with his aristocratic wife, Delia del Carril (Mercedes Moran). In the film, the escape is portrayed as a playful cat-and-mouse chase with police officer Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael Garcia Bernal).
Garcia Bernal’s intrepid Oscar Peluchonneau—and and his failed attempts to capture Neruda—is the source of the film’s humor as the fictitious police officer in charge of bringing in renown poet. Introduced in a voice-over Peluchonneau, son of a prostitute and unidentified father, makes it clear from the start that his intentions are to capture Neruda and make a name for himself in the process.
Garcia Bernal gives an outstanding performance as a straight-faced and incompetent detective trying to make history. Although he is the narrator of the story, he is full of contradictions. He even questions his own existence, especially after a conversation with Neruda’s wife, who insists he is a secondary character; a mere literary creation of the man he is persecuting. Peluchenneau becomes resigned to giving chase, and playing the literary game too by insisting on not being a secondary character.
Neruda enjoys the chase. Like Peluchenneau, he also tries to construct an image for himself and his glorious escape—to reinvent his persona. Neruda is in control of the chase, just as he is of the narrative. He leaves clues intended to make the game more dangerous and thrilling. In the process, he manipulates the possibilities his legend could take. The relationship between Neruda and Peluchenneau and their existential crises gives the film a Borgean sensation of existential co-dependency. The film has a surreal, dream-like feeling.
In this inventive film, Larrain captures Neruda’s intriguing personality. He is presented as a great poet with the ability to provoke great emotion through words. But Neruda is a contradictory character. A romantic and a communist who advocates for the masses, he is also egotist. He’s a member of the leftist elite, a privileged group composed of lawyers, intellectuals and artists. Neruda enjoys a bourgeois lifestyle and frequents brothels, seeming to ignore the daily struggles the very people he defends in the political arena, even while his poetry provides them a voice and captures their troubles and rage.
“Neruda” is not a film about the life of the poet but a work of poetry itself. Larrain mixes fiction with reality. In the process he creates a beautiful and profound narrative, inviting audiences to join the chase, to deconstruct the poetry, and understand its complex narrative and the historical identity of Chile through the poet who influenced the country and bestowed its distinctive voice to the masses.
“Neruda” opens on selected movie theaters on December 16th.
—Estefani Flores
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