Neruda

about art , politic, joy of life, Neruda and his universe, a hunt remembering the obsession of Javert, music of freedom and the Communism in Chilian version. a short sketch of Pinochet. admirable performances - especially Luis Gnecco - and a surprising Gael Garcia Bernal who knows use in the best manner the pieces of sketch defining his character. it is a poem not because it reflects, in subtle, seductive , eccentric, courageous manner a slice from Neruda life but because the significant result after the final credits is a special state. it could be emotion or impact with the new perspective about well known things, the state after a splendid show or the work with the pieces of a large puzzle. because the film is not exactly a biographic one. but a reflection about great, large universal themes in seductive manner.

This is a fictional plot around the very real character of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who, during the 1940's, had also been a senator in the Chilean congress on behalf of the communist party. The film is set in 1948, when the authorities crack down on communists - a time that may be viewed as a chilling precursor to 1970's Pinochet - and the basic plot is about Neruda's escapes from the police, endeavors that force him all over Chile. Luis Gnecco as Neruda is fantastic and so is Mercedes Morán as Delia, Neruda's aristocratic wife. At one level, the film offer a troubling inquiry into the personality of this esteemed poet-intellectual-communist. He is an admired spokesperson for the workers and the downtrodden but he is also a hedonistic drunk and a spoiled womanizer; rough and gentle, strong and weak, Neruda's character and image keeps shifting, and it is to the credit of this film that it never for a moment tries to offer a solution to these complexities. In one memorable episode, a waitress asks Neruda, as he sits at a club-restaurant surrounded by his intellectual-hedonistic friends, suffused with alcohol, whether equality means that everyone will live like he does or whether it means that he, Neruda, will settle for less. I shall not disclose his response.

The camera-work covers a wide range of scenes, from film-noire urban settings to stunning snow covered terrains, all very precisely accompanied by period costumes, designs, motorcycles and horses. However the film aspires, and succeeds, to be by far more than a good period piece. Rather, it is a film about obsession. The psychological roots of this obsession are only hinted to, and this is a good thing too. And the obsessed is Gael García Bernal, playing the detective who relentlessly pursues Neruda. His performance is nothing short of stunning. As the film progresses, and it never rests for a moment, we gradually lose, alongside the characters in the film, any firm grip on reality. Just like in captivating poetic gestures, it becomes less and less clear what is real and what is fiction, what is an event and what is a fantasmatic representation of it, who is a character that actually acts and who is an imaginary ghost. And this is the film's most important achievement.

Pablo Larraín's biopic about Chilean Nobel-winning poet, diplomat and politician Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) (Gnecco), revolves around his at-large cat-and-mouse game with a relentless but allegedly made-up police officer Oscar Peluchonneau (Bernal) closely tailing him during the persecution of Communists issued by the Janus-faced President Gabriel González Videla (Castro) in 1948.

Right out of the box, Larraín archly lays bare his derogative slant toward Videla's government by showing a then-Senator Neruda wrangle with others in the Parliament's resplendent bathroom, before lends him a rodomontading stage of poem recitation during a private gathering, and later doesn't hold back in sending him into a brothel for debauchery, further on, venting barbs to his loyal helpmate Delia del Carril (an age-defying Morán), whom he must leave behind in the third act when heading to the Andes mountains where he will secretly escape to Argentina on horseback. On balance, Larraín's view of Neruda is a solid composite of varying complexities, a larger-than-life character exuding a ghost of mystique, also on the strength of Luis Gnecco's fine performance.

But essentially the film is a meta-fictional dyad of Neruda and Oscar, it is the latter's self-inspecting voice-over traverses the entire running time and whose inexorable pursuance is futile in foresight but, by virtue of Larraín's curve-ball construct of obfuscating the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, Oscar's quest of finding his identity (by the time of the third act, the predator-and-prey pursuit is saliently evolved into a poetic voyage), in fact strikes a more affecting chord with audience by being sublimated into a sort of existential mulling over an individual's congenital frailty: blindly overreaching oneself to compensate for (mostly self-induced) one's deficiency in self-esteem. Gael García Bernal effectively engineers Oscar's painful self-sacrifice with an almost pilgrim-like piety and gravitas.

On the one hand, Larraín's innovative deconstruction-inflected modus operandi brings a wheeze of freshness in the time-worn biopic genre (so is his JACKIE 2016), but on the other hand, it is still an inchoate approach that overly relies on a director's artistic propensity, in this instance, the whole package of NERUDA's saturated, purple-bluish hue, starkly freewheeling camera movement, and a disconcerted accompanying score could not be every cinephile's cuppa, notwithstanding how stimulating it might sound on paper.

I think the movie is a parable of Chile's or Latin America's modern tragic history. Dictatorships of any sort ravaged the continent for some decades. Artists such as Neruda suffered under these regimes. Remember Chilean's Victor Jara executed on a stadium? I think Chileans viewers will find clues in the movie that other ones would miss.

Oscar Pelochonneau represents a typical instrument of these dictatorships: the military/cop/bureaucrat/judge who executes the unjust sentences. Even if he reads Neruda's poetry, he does not understand it; he is under the weight of his mediocrity. Moreover, he despises the rebels-in a scene we see how he calls them scums; and this shows his ignorance.

Neruda represents then the creator, the artist whose words transcend historical time-his words survive the temporary regimes and give hope to those who suffer. In this sense, in a surprising act, we see how Neruda's friends give away clues to where he might be - he can't be apprehended because his creation cannot be apprehended, so we might just well tell you where he is. Also, in this sense, even his follower and what he represents is an idea that the writers of age imagined already.

Common in Latin America literature and cinema (eg Madeinusa, Jauja), we encounter a mysterious, lawless, remote and harsh territory. In these territories one uninitiated foreigner might experience transformation and sometimes redemption. Now, we have Oscar following Neruda in such a territory at the country border. We may expect that after his experience here, the typical Oscar will raise somewhere to be a better person.

Perhaps due to the focus on the above themes and the pursuing story, there is a smaller emphasis on the actual poetry or on his socialist views. It's interesting to glimpse into the beginnings of socialist attempts in Chile. The movie raises other questions-say, how a bourgeois as Neruda is after all, is understanding the lower class - and he is confronted about this by a peasant. Other question: up to what point you risk your freedom to help him escape?

I had never seen a Pablo Larrain film until 2016's Jackie, which turned out to be a unique and singular directorial vision. Because of it I became a fan of him and perhaps that's why I expected more of the same free-form storytelling here. In that respect it was not what I expected, but the film is still very much distinct from what usual biopics are. I can understand why there seems to be so much frustration from some viewers, and while the film did lose me at times, the acting, cinematography, and fluid directing were enough to keep me more engaged as it went on. The finale is also really well done, and that final shot is very memorable.