Pablo Larraín (2016)

Another cinema visit, another poet biopic:  five days after Emily Dickinson comes Pablo Neruda.  He has featured in screen comedy-drama before, in Michael Radford’s The Postman (Il Postino) (1994).  In that film, Neruda was one half of a double act with the title character.  This time, Chile’s most famous writer is the eponymous hero but he once again shares top billing with another character.  Unlike Philippe Noiret and Massimo Troisi in Il Postino, Luis Gnecco and Gael García Bernal don’t share much screen time in Pablo Larraín’s movie.  Bernal plays a police chief, Oscar Peluchonneau, whose attempts to track down Neruda are inept and largely unavailing.  Neruda was, as well as a writer, a politician – a Communist senator in the Chilean government until, in 1948, he denounced the increasingly right-wing and repressive policies of President Gabriel González Videla’s administration.  Threatened with arrest by the authorities, Neruda went underground.  Larraín’s film concentrates on his singular life as a fugitive – which included fleeting but provocative public appearances – in the months that followed.  The story concludes in the Andes, immediately before Neruda’s escape to Argentina in the spring of 1949.  (Il Postino takes up Neruda’s life story from shortly after this point.  It’s set in the early 1950s, when he was living in exile on Capri.)  

The encounter in the mountains between Neruda and Peluchonneau could be described as a non-showdown; as such, it’s a fitting climax to the meta-narrative of Neruda.  A conversation between the police chief and Neruda’s wife Delia (Mercedes Morán), an Argentine aristocrat, epitomises Pablo Larraín’s approach.  Delia asks Peluchonneau if he realises he’s playing a supporting role – beside her husband’s heroic leading role – that he is, in fact, ‘fiction’.  (Oscar Peluchonneau is indeed a character invented by Larraín and Guillermo Calderón, who wrote the screenplay for Neruda.)  Peluchonneau, after freezing to death in the snow, revives:  looking out of a motel window, he explains in voiceover that Neruda has immortalised him.   If you go to this film with a good prior knowledge of its subject’s biography and writings it may be understandable and enjoyable.  Lacking such knowledge, I found it tiresomely uninvolving.   In that exchange between Peluchonneau and Delia, their conversation seems continuous but the camera keeps cutting between shots of them indoors and outdoors.  I can’t think this device is anything more than a jocose suggestion on Larraín’s part that the ‘reality’ of a story is whatever the author wants it to be.  Neruda is a clever film-maker’s jeu d’esprit – so obviously so that it’s hard to engage with intellectually, let alone emotionally.

The physical casting of the two main roles is interesting.  The heavy, unprepossessing Luis Gnecco plays a sharp, flamboyant and lustful man; Gael García Bernal, better looking and better known to international audiences, is a loner and a loser.  Gnecco is charismatic and chameleonic, and gives much the more effective performance.  Although his lack of height makes it easy for Bernal to play an underdog, his natural aura of shrewdness seems at odds with the script’s conception of Peluchonneau as Neruda’s stooge.  It took some time for me to realise that it was Bernal’s voice narrating the story – the policeman’s pithy political commentary doesn’t fit with the person he is on screen.   (There are a lot of words to keep up with – the voiceover, the dialogue, lines of poetry.)  Neruda moves supply and has a lovely score by Federico Jusid; the Andean snowscape in the closing stages is powerfully beautiful.  But this was, for me, a foreign language film in more ways than one.   With Jackie and Neruda, Pablo Larraín has made two formally fancy biographical pieces in very short order.   I hope he can now revert to more straightforward and absorbing storytelling along the lines of No (2012), which remains his best movie.

18 April 2017