Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme six, part two- a South American film!
(Chosen by Jackie!)
(This review will contain spoilers.)
(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.
