There are a few figures in history that could conceivably buck that trend. I'd number famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda amongst them. The man lived about five lives in one and met his end in a manner so politically charged that conclusions are still being sought to this day. You won't get to dig into many of those lives within of Pablo Larraín's aggressively framed Neruda though. Actually, Larraín's treatment of Neruda's life excises all but the six months leading up to his flight across the Andes on horseback, and not all that much of that time is spent with Neruda himself.
So, it seems Larraín isn't a fan of the biopic either. Or if he is, he's of the live fast, die young school.
Not getting the necessary raw materials from Neruda's own life, Larraín's masterful conceit is to dig them up out of the poet's ideas, hence his giving much of Neruda's story over to the policeman who was set on the poet's exiled tail. A policeman who Neruda flagrantly baits. A policeman who is desperate to transcend his small existence. A policeman who may or may not exist at all. And I mean that as conceptually as it could possibly be meant.
I'll throw in here that I'm a soak for all things meta-textual, so I was doubly joyed that Larraín signalled he'd be going down this path early on. Lapping up all these free-flowing ideas was enough to distract me from the translucent beauty of Neruda's look and, it has to be said since it is very nearly tactile, its feel. If Larraín's previous film, The Club, arrested the senses immediately and used them in the service of its pitch black heart, Neruda does so with a more open soul. It has an aspirational texture (all honey-softness and lens flare), where before there was blanketing murk. There is little wonder Larraín is pulling plaudits for the intensity of his technical acumen and his ability to employ it in the service of his expanding his ideas.
Cushioned by Sergio Armstrong's welcoming cinematography, Neruda roams freely through a landscape of ideas and feelings. Conversations string linear thoughts through constantly shifting backgrounds, broadening the reach of the poet's politics and his emotional polemics. The manifesto for life is delivered through the warm but imposing performance from Luis Gnecco and always anchored in the lusty hedonism that fascists are invariably at pains to shut down with the most lethal straight-laced force.
Neruda takes this manifesto to his policeman, Oscar Peluchoneau, who in turn has to grapple not only with his creative inadequacy but with the fact that he is potentially a creation himself. Gael García Bernal’s bemused interpretation of Peluchoneau brings heartbreaking colour to the role. His is a battle for artistic sentience that illuminates the conservative mindset with a glimmer of hopeful potential, even if it is ultimately (possibly) only a reverie from the soul of a man who could bury an army with a single love poem.
I don’t deploy the army allusions lightly. This is what happens when ideas face off against arms. Lives are lost and ideas live on. Legacies become generation-enriching lifebloods; totalitarian regimes become shrouds draped over forever-seeping national wounds. Neruda isn’t blind to the fact that its champion fraternised with the militant left, indeed it revels in the irony (a particularly cutting scene sees the contradiction of left-leaning elites getting into bed with grassroots socialists come to a head at an ebullient dinner party), but it is the poetic conceptualisation that wins out.
Neruda culminates in a swirl of emotion. Of ideas. Of lyric beauty. It burns bright. It extinguishes itself with passionate self-examination. It lives fast. It dies young. Just not in ways you’d expect.
And it looks stunning while doing it.
(Continue reading Jackie review...)
★★★★☆
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