Neruda

"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

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.

A nonstop and riotous pursuit in which an implacable inspector called Óscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal) hunts down Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) , who becomes a fugitive in his home country in the late 1940s . Finding himself threatened with arrest for joining the Party Communist , Neruda went into hiding and he and his 2ª wife (Mercedes Morán) were smuggled from house to house hidden by supporters and admirers for thirteen months . Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions in various countries during his lifetime and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President Gabriel González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest . Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso ; Neruda escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina.

This interesting film holds itself on three premises really described : A renowned poet , an unknown inspector and a legendary manhunt . Engaging picture inspired on facts , about a relentless human chase through roads , mountains , rivers and a cold environment . The movie concerning about two main roles , a burly , fatty and intelligent poet : Neruda , very good played by Luis Gnecco , and a tough , merciless pursuer Inspector , magnificently played by Gael Garcia Bernal . Support cast is pretty good , such as : Mercedes Morán as his second wife Delia del Carril ,Pablo Derqui as Víctor Pey and Emilio Gutiérrez Caba as Pablo Picasso . The motion picture was well directed by Pablo Larrian . It won several Awards: Nominated for 1 Golden Globe and another 11 wins & 30 nominations.

Adding some remarks about his tumultuous life : Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (12 July 1904 - 23 September 1973), better known by his pen name Pablo Neruda) , was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). Bolstered by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Neruda, like many left-leaning intellectuals of his generation, came to admire the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, partly for the role it played in defeating Nazi Germany and partly because of an idealist interpretation of Marxist doctrine. This is echoed in poems such as "Canto a Stalingrado" (1942) and "Nuevo canto de amor a Stalingrado" (1943). In 1953, Neruda was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. Upon Stalin's death that same year, Neruda wrote an ode to him, as he also wrote poems in praise of Fulgencio Batista, "Saludo a Batista" ("Salute to Batista"), and later to Fidel Castro. Neruda escaped from Gonzalez Videla dictatorship , once out of Chile, he spent the next three years in exile.Neruda moved to Valdivia, in southern Chile. From Valdivia he moved to Fundo Huishue, a forestry estate in the vicinity of Huishue Lake. Neruda's life underground ended in March 1949 when he fled over the Lilpela Pass in the Andes Mountains to Argentina on horseback. He would dramatically recount his escape from Chile in his Nobel Prize lecture. In Buenos Aires, Neruda took advantage of the slight resemblance between him and his friend, the future Nobel Prize-winning novelist and cultural attaché to the Guatemalan embassy Miguel Ángel Asturias, to travel to Europe using Asturias' passport.Pablo Picasso arranged his entrance into Paris and Neruda made a surprise appearance there to a stunned World Congress of Peace Forces, while the Chilean government denied that the poet could have escaped the country His fervent Stalinism eventually drove a wedge between Neruda and his long-time friend Octavio Paz, who commented that "Neruda became more and more Stalinist, while I became less and less enchanted with Stalin. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.Neruda was a close advisor to Chile's socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people. Neruda was hospitalised with cancer at the time of the coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet that overthrew Allende's government, but returned home after a few days when he suspected a doctor of injecting him with an unknown substance for the purpose of murdering him on Pinochet's orders. Neruda died in his house in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973, just hours after leaving the hospital. Neruda is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and influential worldwide. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language", and Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the 26 writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon.

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.