Neruda (2016) - It's more fun to help a communist than call the cops.

Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020!  Theme six, part two- a South American film!

(Chosen by Jackie!)

(This review will contain spoilers.)

I am not here to review Pablo Neruda, noted Chilean communist, diplomat, and Nobel Laureate poet.  As it was with Van Gogh (reportedly an influence on today's film), I have done my level best in the last week to read up on his life, his accomplishments, his work, the controversial areas of his life, whatever I can manage between watching and writing about other films, working my job, and generally existing as a person who isn't 100% consumed by a single pursuit.  This subsequently means my perspective on the man is greatly limited, and to approach Neruda as wholly a film about the man and his mark would be to tackle the work from an angle lacking sufficient equipment and experience.  By the same token, Neruda, the 2016 film directed by Pablo Lerraín, written by Guillermo Calderón, and starring Luis Gnecco and Gael García Bernal that I AM here to review, is not wholly a film about Pablo Neruda.  It concerns a relatively brief period in his life, being the thirteen month period from Februar 1948 to March 1949 when he and wife Delia del Carril hid in various friends' safehouses across Chile to avoid arrest, during which time the Chilean Communist Party was banned and its members sent to concentration camps.  Much of Lerraín's film is content to treat these events as a distant possibility, in favor of following Neruda's attempts to remain active as an underground party representative and, most importantly to our discussion today, evade a lone policeman.

Gael García Bernal's Óscar Peluchonneau makes a fascinating presence in the film.  His first and most frequently felt role is that of disruptive narrator, sliding into scenes as little more than a voice that points out the inherent hypocrisy of the Communist Party's leadership, the hollow intent behind Neruda's words, the disgust one feels at watching a fat old man revel in his friends' collective wealth while espousing the values of a people's party in exile.  Ócar is practically omniscient in this role, which stands as intriguing contrast to his physical presence, in which he is charged to hunt down and arrest Neruda, and yet never seems capable of finishing the job.  Any time he arrives in a building where we the audience just saw Neruda entertaining with a poetic recital (cut down by Óscar as an easyily remembered, sloppily written early work that still placates the faux intellectuals in the crowd), the prey has slipped away and left behind only uncooperative witnesses.  Our intrepid lawman may ensnare a woman falsely claiming she's Neruda's wife, or corner an eager fan of Neruda's work who displays passionate love for his idol, or roughly interrogate a close colleague seen growing dissatisfied with his cohort's activities, but it's all for naught.  They'll refuse to say a bad word about Neruda on live radio at Óscar's behest, regale Óscar with scathing accounts of how fine and beautiful a man can never be understood by one so coarse and base, seem to break under intimidation without giving away anything.  He is, all told, a rather ineffectual presence, seemingly incapable of fulfilling his appointed task.

We also come to understand how, deep as Óscar's disdain for Neruda's hypocrisy runs through his veins, he too is a bundled mass of contradictions and selective views.  Where he criticizes Neruda for standing for and coming from nothing, Óscar is a man who only half-believes his father was a great officer of the law, without any real certainty that he too should hold such a title.  Óscar will tear down Neruda for using a poet's empty honeyed words, yet he is a man of great lyrical speech, inventing memorable turns of phrase with every other line and running a constant inner monologue in Gael García's gruff yet tonally pleasing voice.  Here we have a man professing an undying hatred of his mark's communist ideals whilst positioning himself as the people's will made manifest, chasing after a target he believes worthless and incompetent without making any headwind whatsoever.  And of course, we cannot ignore how his beautiful inner voice, already a strange quality for one who so despises a poet, fails him in one-on-one conversation, and he comes across a man of all bark no bite.



It's appropriate Óscar is such a mess of varying perspectives and relentless, single-minded hatred towards Neruda - he's Neruda's idea.  A little more than an hour into Neruda, after Pablo Neruda has given up on safehouses and fled across the Andes to Argentina, Óscar encounters Delia, and she tells him that he's little more than an idle thought her husband has entertained in exile.  All Óscar Peluchonneau amounts to is Neruda's fancy of a great police officer who tirelessly tails his every move, affording near-misses aplenty and giving his actions greater meaning.  As an approach to biopicing it's a terribly clever conceit, as it allows Lerrían the ability to take a near-requisite fictional addition to the story and render him an active critique on the concept.  While we see Pablo Nerudo do many great things, there's a voice attributed to his own invention letting us know in poetic terms how down-low and cowardly one can interpret these actions.  The excitement drawn from a time of excruciating boredom becomes invention of a creative mind seeking new avenues of self-consideration, and the criticism of the subject becomes self-aware self-doubt.  We effectively find Neruda a film as much about a harsher, unflattering portrait of a man with his fair share of controversial stances and deeds given flesh and character, and asked to consider his own vitality.

Where the film comes so, so terribly close to true ascendancy is in how Óscar rejections his fictionhood.  The film continues for a solid forty minutes past the quietly-played revelation, and as he draws a bead on Neruda across the snowy ends of the earth, the picture becomes far more dynamically dramatic.  A color palate of blinding gray lights and muted purple semidarkness and hazy orange dens gives way to the powerful starkness of white planes dotted with trees beneath a clean blue sky, frequently punctured by torrents of rain or snow.  The action involves far more movement across great distances, complete with strange Hitchcock-homaging rear projection passages.  Music swells to an orchestral fever pitch, punctuating deeds of physical endurance from a man betrayed and incapacitated at the last second.  And Óscar's narration, most importantly of all, totally rejects the notion of existing purely as a self-reflexive reflecting device for Neruda.

He is, after all, not a fantasy, not a falsehood, not "not real," merely a fiction.  The hole in his past and sense of purpose is not filled by a sense of being of his creator - though he claims himself less Peluchonneau than Neruda, he pursues nonetheless.  Those repeated claims of his target's beauty and intellectual greatness from those close to him do nothing to shake Óscar's resolve, even as he staggers from a grievous head injury over a towering ravine.  As he comes to the place and time of dying Neruda has effectively written for him as he nears the end of his usefulness with Neruda's passage to safety in full exile, Óscar falls to the snow, seemingly dead with a dramatic final statement having escaped his mind... only to rise again and continue struggling onward, thinking all the while on how it doesn't matter who he is or where he came from or what Neruda means him to be.  He is according to himself to the bitter end, determined to see this man in a different light that he perceives as self-evident, to perform his impossible task with no realistic end even if he can never exist within 100 meters of his creator/prey while he still draws breath.

When Óscar finally expires and Neruda arrives to look over his corpse, we as the audience can understand him as a thought no longer beholden to its originator.  From what we are shown, Neruda's actions could be taken as either saintly or sinful, the deeds of a great man working hard to keep his party alive in exile and his circle of family and cohorts happy and healthy; or else the cowardly movements of a wretch who indulges in his friends' wealth and keeps himself fat and delirious while those he represents suffer.  Taking Neruda as the intersection between Great Man and Great Artist, Óscar's commitment to being the pursuer who lyrically damns Pablo Neruda with every word holds potential to become representative of the need to critique a biographical subject.  He's not just Pablo Neruda's invention, after all - he's Pablo Lerraín's as well, and represents just as much the need to avoid wholly flattering portrayals of complicated real people as Neruda's self-doubt in his actions during exile.  Óscar Peluchonneau née Neruda CAN escape that which he was made for, stand as a fictional person and real idea fully confident in his own self, the reflective dark take on any and all we idolize.  Irrespective of what one thinks of the real Pablo Neruda, all biopic subjects should receive similar treatment if the documenting work is to possess total value.

Neruda does not quite take this route, and I am somewhat disappointed in it as a result.  In its final movement, as Pablo Neruda arrives in Argentina, he recounts his experiences over the last year to a crowd, and names Óscar Peluchonneau as the officer who chased him so relentlessly in this time.  In voiceover set to the image of him rising from a grave, Óscar is given new life, and his words now reflect on how he finally, truly understands Neruda and his words and deeds, how the man was a true noble spirit who did what he thought best for his people and had basically the right idea all the way through.  Most importantly, Óscar claims gratitude towards his creator for granting him immortality, and I cannot follow the film to this conclusion.  Óscar's refusal to be defined by what Neruda intended him as coupled with his relentless embrace of his role for its own, independent sake should have been enough to grant him immortality.  He could easily have embodied a "Hold on, let's look at things another way," spirit if he simply died on his own terms and lived on in every second taken to consider an alternate viewpoint.  He did not NEED his creator to put a capstone on his purpose, drag him back into the existence he so fiercely denied, and then thank his originator for showing him the light.  It smacks of a work striking out into daring new territories, and then backing off to settle in the safe, familiar waters of ultimately lionizing a biopic's subject as basically an alright guy who had good ideas most of the time.

While I am not here to review Pablo Neruda the man, I would be amiss if I failed to note how my limited knowledge of the man (despite best efforts) impacts my ability to write a proper, fully-accounted review.  I cannot rightly claim I've a definitive take on a man whose legacy looms so large over the Western Canon when the most I've done is read scattered poems and accounts of his doings, especially not when this film comes from a Chilean director, cast, and crew who've likely their own deeply-held beliefs about a man who's typically championed as one of their country's finest citizens.  What I want from taking Neruda as the story of A Great Artist's self-criticism taking on a life of its own is likely not what people with far greater knowledge about the subject and a far finer appreciation for the work they're evoking than myself set out to make, and it's important to acknowledge this limitation in my framework.  Where I see hollow praise, Lerraín may very likely intend a satisfactory nuanced point.  Such is the price of seeking out so much varied art and encountering topics one cannot comprehended with a week's effort.

Still, much as it's important to recognize the specificity in Neruda, I do believe its presence and power as a broader commentary on the art of biopic filmmaking and representing truths about once-living persons matters a fair deal, and if an otherwise beautiful, impressively-constructed film lets me down in its final movement with a conclusion that seems contrary to all else it has said, then I am left with a lessened opinion.  Not so lessened as to take away form its accomplishments, or diminish the wonderful self-constructing portrait of both a real figure and his fictional harsher enemy, or make any of it BAD.  It does, however, knock a 4-star film with potential to rise high as a 4.5* down to a 3.5, which makes me sad.  Something this unique in its views on biography is something I WANT to elicit a stronger response, or at least not elicit such a response and then make a U-turn down an avenue I'm not quite down for.

*(The way the concentration camps are treated as a distant, almost inconsequential abstract for much of the film does place a limitation on its potential, unfortunatley.  I feel Óscar's partial status as Neruda's thoughts on how the common man must view him had room for more work on this front, considering how many times he visits the camp to little effect.  Make him a man torn between loyalties and ideologies by having family there, maybe?  I'm just spitballing ideas for the footnote here.)

3.5/5