Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda and Delia del Carril
NERUDA B-
Chile Argentina France
Spain USA (107 mi) 2016
‘Scope d: Pablo Larraín
On our earth, before
writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry
flourished. That is why we know that
poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants,
by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
—Pablo Neruda
One might think this is a wildly imaginative and somewhat
chaotic way of revealing the interior thoughts of one of the world’s greatest
poets, Pablo Neruda, yet instead, like Larraín’s other works, it remains coolly
ineffectual, revealing next to nothing about the man or his poetry, becoming a
kind of man-on-the-run political spoof, as the director’s mocking style simply
deludes reality. What we do know about
Neruda cannot be found in this film, as it makes no attempts to be biographically
informative, but instead persists on examining just one of the post-World War
II years in Chile when Gabriel González Videla was President from 1946 to
1952. After receiving support from
communists to get elected, which at that time were split with the socialists,
at the urging of the United States the nation banned the Communist Party, first
expelling them from the cabinet before outlawing them as a political party in
1948, a ban that remained in effect until 1958.
With a crackdown on communists who were subjected to mass arrests, stripped
of their right to vote, poet and Communist Senator Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco)
offered a seething rebuke to the President, first at an outrageously surreal
political gathering set inside a lavish public urinal the size of a department
store with all the distinguished guests present before criticizing the
President for “selling out to the United States” in a speech before the
National Congress. Shortly afterwards he
was forced underground where he remained in hiding for the next thirteen months
before spending the next three years in exile after escaping over the Andes
Mountains to Argentina on horseback, a story dramatically recalled during his
Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1971.
From the champagne parties with naked revelers to his bohemian relationship
with fellow artist Delia del Carril (Mercedes Morán), it’s clear Neruda was no
ordinary communist, where the rules of the game made exceptions for his
presence. Delia joined the French
Communist Party after the First World War, as she was studying painting in
Paris at the time, where they initially met in the mid 1930’s when she was 50
years old and he was only 30, but their age difference was offset by her
intelligence, vitality, and beauty, as their home became a meeting place for
the great intellectuals, artists and writers of the time.
Unfortunately Larraín’s unsettling and overly confusing film
won’t make a dent in Neruda’s popularity, which was buoyed immensely by the
massive popularity of the film Il
Postino (The Postman) (1994), a fictional film based on a novel inspired by
an incident in Neruda’s life, the only foreign-language film to be nominated
for a Best Picture Award in more than 20 years, where the theatrical run was so
long (almost two years), it was still in theaters after the video release and
its initial cable run. Gabriel García
Márquez called Neruda “the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language,”
while New York Times book review
critic Selden Rodman observed after the poet’s death, “No writer of world
renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans,” yet surprisingly this
film contains little poetry, doling it out almost exclusively through narrative
passages, as instead the film invents a plot device in the questionable
character of Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal), a fascist police
inspector that hounds him through his various escape routes, always one step
behind, taunted along the way with notes placed in books of poetry left behind
by Neruda. This fascination with an
alter-ego is along the lines of Sherlock Holmes and his infamous Moriarty,
while the cat and mouse game alters the entire mood of the film, offering a
playful, illusionary tone that has the effect of keeping the viewers off-guard
as well, as Peluchonneau is something of a delusional fool, “half moron, half
idiot,” as he’s described near the end, yet the film is narrated throughout by
his less than trustworthy character, where the entire film exists in a kind of
bogus stream-of-conscious netherworld.
It’s a choice made the director that has a way of preventing
identification with any of the characters, remaining elusive and overly
detached. If interior passages of
Neruda’s poetry had played a more significant part, adding emotional resonance
to the communist struggle, for instance, this might have been an ingeniously
inventive film, but as is, it feels strangely convoluted, where the artist
himself remains distanced from those workers and peasants that he claims to
maintain solidarity with throughout his journey. Instead, while he escapes, we see them rounded
up, arrested, and simply thrown into prison while he continually remains
protected. The chaotic nature of the
film may reflect the extent of his alienation, but it offers little contact
with the struggle, and no evidence of hope, where instead he remains bogged
down by his own existential struggles.
Perhaps the most damning part of the film is its refusal to
embrace the artistry of the poet, where we rarely, if ever, actually see him
write or spend any time in reflection, where instead he’s shown as aloof and
indifferent, having little regard for others.
While this is a landmark moment in Chilean history, onscreen we find
Neruda partying in brothels with the bourgeoisie, showing a fondness for his
sensual vices, where we never see that side of him that millions embrace
through his writings. While there is a
reference that 10,000 union workers were moved to a stunned silence when he
brought a piece of paper out of his pocket to read, or that he read his poetry
before 100,000 citizens in Brazil, it is the power of his words to embrace
human equality and to discover a common worldwide humanity, where his message
of communism and worker’s rights is what made him dangerous to the
government. Yet we don’t get a hint of
that, instead we’re bogged down by this idiot game with a delusional police
inspector that doesn’t even exist, where the best he can do is drive around in
circles in front of the Presidential Palace blowing the car horn to ensure the
President doesn’t get a good night’s sleep, adding the comical element of farce
to the psychological deficiencies of his tracker, continually moving from place
to place, becoming a road movie simply by the changing locations. While new poems are presumably mailed to the masses
to keep the underground movement thriving, all we see are trips to the mailbox,
as we don’t hear the poems, or see anyone other than the inspector reading
them. This disconnect prevents the
viewers from learning more about the significance of this artist, as what lines
of poetry we hear are mentioned right alongside the mysterious inner thoughts
of the psychologically challenged police inspector, who yearns to catch his
man, gather fame and adulation, while learning to be a bit of a poet
himself. Of course, none of that ever
happens, so the messenger actually dilutes the message. There is no transcending force that unites
the artist with the struggle, instead the film seems more concerned about
showcasing the police inspector’s ultimate failure, as if fascism would be
overthrown or undermined by a lack of conscious, all of which feels strangely
disconnected from the real cause.
Postscript (not in the film)
The ultimate irony is that Neruda was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1971, the year after the Chilean Communist Party
nominated him for President. He withdrew
his nomination to make way for Socialist nominee Salvador Allende, who in 1970
became the first Marxist candidate to be a democratically elected President in
any South American country, appointing Neruda to be the ambassador to France,
returning to Chile in 1973 due to poor health, just in time for America’s
intervention in a CIA sponsored coup d'état, surrounding the capital with
troops, removing Allende from power by force (he allegedly committed suicide
the next day), replacing him with a fascist military dictatorship lead by
General Augusto Pinochet that remained in power until 1990. Pinochet’s dictatorship dissolved Congress,
suspended the Constitution, and began a persecution of alleged dissidents in
which thousands of Allende supporters were kidnapped, tortured, and
murdered. Among them may have included
Pablo Neruda, who was hospitalized with cancer, where he died under mysterious
circumstances, with a doctor injecting an unknown substance into his stomach,
with Neruda’s driver, Manuel Araya, claiming he was poisoned, perhaps under the
orders of Pinochet, as he died six hours later.
What ultimately happened remains a mystery. In contrast to JFK’s historic funeral
procession, as shown in Larraín’s film Jackie
(2016), where over 100 foreign dignitaries showed up and the entire nation
watched on public television, Pinochet refused to allow Neruda’s funeral to
become a public event, where it took place under a massive police presence,
with Neruda’s house broken into, his papers and books taken or destroyed, while
thousands of Chileans disobeyed the curfew and demonstrated on the streets.
