Neruda

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.

"If nothing saves us from death, at least love should save us from life." Neruda

The Chilean Noble laureate Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco)is depicted in Pablo Larrain's Neruda, a fiction showing the poet-politician as heroic, profane, poetic, and fat. He's a stew that can seduce women and provoke presidents, a genius communist in the late 1940's who became a fugitive for joining the party.

The film is alternately serious about this leftist politician and writer pursued by fictional police detective Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael Garcia Bernal) and playful as he cavorts with strumpets to remind us of his vigorous friend, Picasso (Emilio Guttierrez Caba). Neruda is less the poet and more the champagne Communist.

Larrain's filming is poetic, too, full of lush, shadowy shots that reinforce the complex lyrical details of a poet on the run. Yet, this is not a biopic; rather it is an imaginative rendering in the poet's own spirit as it comes through in his poetry and Stalinist affections. A scene with a drag queen discussing how Neruda incites passion is all you need to know about the difference between Neruda's magical words and the lower order of his daily life.

Although Oscar's pursuit of Neruda smacks of Javert's obsession in Les Miserables, Bernal plays him as a serious policeman with a thirst for connection to Neruda. In large part, everyone who meets Neruda, even his fellow legislators when he is a senator, seems to be hypnotized by his words and his bravery.

Most of all the film does an exemplary job of depicting Neruda as a demigod whose very presence demands devotion and a shared passion for life and happiness only through the patient devotion to one's country and one's loves:

"Love is not about property, diamonds and gifts. It is about sharing your very self with the world around you." Neruda

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.

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.

Neruda is an ambitious and out-of-the-box kind of film that in a poetic way tries to combine fiction with nonfiction, saluting the work and wit of Neruda and other artists of his time. However, in my opinion the film does not quite move the way it is supposed to. Cinematographically, it is very well done, with a lot of care for the use of light and surrounding elements. The underscore engulfs the scenes with a sense of drama and vibrant energy, but this is also where it goes wrong: the scenes themselves, do not bring the kind of energy and drama to the screen one might expect from this kind of tale. The minimalism and introvert approach to the acting in Neruda is perhaps somewhat too subtle, reversing the characters to almost two-dimensional beings that lack the personality or warmth that is needed to draw the viewer in. The script and the way some dialogues are cut and played out in different rooms confirm that ultimately Neruda's attempt to escape is a long poem on its own. Only, unfortunately, it is a bit too long and too cold to truly sink in.