Neruda

I think the movie is a parable of Chile's or Latin America's modern tragic history. Dictatorships of any sort ravaged the continent for some decades. Artists such as Neruda suffered under these regimes. Remember Chilean's Victor Jara executed on a stadium? I think Chileans viewers will find clues in the movie that other ones would miss.

Oscar Pelochonneau represents a typical instrument of these dictatorships: the military/cop/bureaucrat/judge who executes the unjust sentences. Even if he reads Neruda's poetry, he does not understand it; he is under the weight of his mediocrity. Moreover, he despises the rebels-in a scene we see how he calls them scums; and this shows his ignorance.

Neruda represents then the creator, the artist whose words transcend historical time-his words survive the temporary regimes and give hope to those who suffer. In this sense, in a surprising act, we see how Neruda's friends give away clues to where he might be - he can't be apprehended because his creation cannot be apprehended, so we might just well tell you where he is. Also, in this sense, even his follower and what he represents is an idea that the writers of age imagined already.

Common in Latin America literature and cinema (eg Madeinusa, Jauja), we encounter a mysterious, lawless, remote and harsh territory. In these territories one uninitiated foreigner might experience transformation and sometimes redemption. Now, we have Oscar following Neruda in such a territory at the country border. We may expect that after his experience here, the typical Oscar will raise somewhere to be a better person.

Perhaps due to the focus on the above themes and the pursuing story, there is a smaller emphasis on the actual poetry or on his socialist views. It's interesting to glimpse into the beginnings of socialist attempts in Chile. The movie raises other questions-say, how a bourgeois as Neruda is after all, is understanding the lower class - and he is confronted about this by a peasant. Other question: up to what point you risk your freedom to help him escape?

Neruda is an ambitious and out-of-the-box kind of film that in a poetic way tries to combine fiction with nonfiction, saluting the work and wit of Neruda and other artists of his time. However, in my opinion the film does not quite move the way it is supposed to. Cinematographically, it is very well done, with a lot of care for the use of light and surrounding elements. The underscore engulfs the scenes with a sense of drama and vibrant energy, but this is also where it goes wrong: the scenes themselves, do not bring the kind of energy and drama to the screen one might expect from this kind of tale. The minimalism and introvert approach to the acting in Neruda is perhaps somewhat too subtle, reversing the characters to almost two-dimensional beings that lack the personality or warmth that is needed to draw the viewer in. The script and the way some dialogues are cut and played out in different rooms confirm that ultimately Neruda's attempt to escape is a long poem on its own. Only, unfortunately, it is a bit too long and too cold to truly sink in.

Pablo Larraín's biopic about Chilean Nobel-winning poet, diplomat and politician Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) (Gnecco), revolves around his at-large cat-and-mouse game with a relentless but allegedly made-up police officer Oscar Peluchonneau (Bernal) closely tailing him during the persecution of Communists issued by the Janus-faced President Gabriel González Videla (Castro) in 1948.

Right out of the box, Larraín archly lays bare his derogative slant toward Videla's government by showing a then-Senator Neruda wrangle with others in the Parliament's resplendent bathroom, before lends him a rodomontading stage of poem recitation during a private gathering, and later doesn't hold back in sending him into a brothel for debauchery, further on, venting barbs to his loyal helpmate Delia del Carril (an age-defying Morán), whom he must leave behind in the third act when heading to the Andes mountains where he will secretly escape to Argentina on horseback. On balance, Larraín's view of Neruda is a solid composite of varying complexities, a larger-than-life character exuding a ghost of mystique, also on the strength of Luis Gnecco's fine performance.

But essentially the film is a meta-fictional dyad of Neruda and Oscar, it is the latter's self-inspecting voice-over traverses the entire running time and whose inexorable pursuance is futile in foresight but, by virtue of Larraín's curve-ball construct of obfuscating the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, Oscar's quest of finding his identity (by the time of the third act, the predator-and-prey pursuit is saliently evolved into a poetic voyage), in fact strikes a more affecting chord with audience by being sublimated into a sort of existential mulling over an individual's congenital frailty: blindly overreaching oneself to compensate for (mostly self-induced) one's deficiency in self-esteem. Gael García Bernal effectively engineers Oscar's painful self-sacrifice with an almost pilgrim-like piety and gravitas.

On the one hand, Larraín's innovative deconstruction-inflected modus operandi brings a wheeze of freshness in the time-worn biopic genre (so is his JACKIE 2016), but on the other hand, it is still an inchoate approach that overly relies on a director's artistic propensity, in this instance, the whole package of NERUDA's saturated, purple-bluish hue, starkly freewheeling camera movement, and a disconcerted accompanying score could not be every cinephile's cuppa, notwithstanding how stimulating it might sound on paper.

A nonstop and riotous pursuit in which an implacable inspector called Óscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal) hunts down Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) , who becomes a fugitive in his home country in the late 1940s . Finding himself threatened with arrest for joining the Party Communist , Neruda went into hiding and he and his 2ª wife (Mercedes Morán) were smuggled from house to house hidden by supporters and admirers for thirteen months . Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions in various countries during his lifetime and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President Gabriel González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest . Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso ; Neruda escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina.

This interesting film holds itself on three premises really described : A renowned poet , an unknown inspector and a legendary manhunt . Engaging picture inspired on facts , about a relentless human chase through roads , mountains , rivers and a cold environment . The movie concerning about two main roles , a burly , fatty and intelligent poet : Neruda , very good played by Luis Gnecco , and a tough , merciless pursuer Inspector , magnificently played by Gael Garcia Bernal . Support cast is pretty good , such as : Mercedes Morán as his second wife Delia del Carril ,Pablo Derqui as Víctor Pey and Emilio Gutiérrez Caba as Pablo Picasso . The motion picture was well directed by Pablo Larrian . It won several Awards: Nominated for 1 Golden Globe and another 11 wins & 30 nominations.

Adding some remarks about his tumultuous life : Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (12 July 1904 - 23 September 1973), better known by his pen name Pablo Neruda) , was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). Bolstered by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Neruda, like many left-leaning intellectuals of his generation, came to admire the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, partly for the role it played in defeating Nazi Germany and partly because of an idealist interpretation of Marxist doctrine. This is echoed in poems such as "Canto a Stalingrado" (1942) and "Nuevo canto de amor a Stalingrado" (1943). In 1953, Neruda was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. Upon Stalin's death that same year, Neruda wrote an ode to him, as he also wrote poems in praise of Fulgencio Batista, "Saludo a Batista" ("Salute to Batista"), and later to Fidel Castro. Neruda escaped from Gonzalez Videla dictatorship , once out of Chile, he spent the next three years in exile.Neruda moved to Valdivia, in southern Chile. From Valdivia he moved to Fundo Huishue, a forestry estate in the vicinity of Huishue Lake. Neruda's life underground ended in March 1949 when he fled over the Lilpela Pass in the Andes Mountains to Argentina on horseback. He would dramatically recount his escape from Chile in his Nobel Prize lecture. In Buenos Aires, Neruda took advantage of the slight resemblance between him and his friend, the future Nobel Prize-winning novelist and cultural attaché to the Guatemalan embassy Miguel Ángel Asturias, to travel to Europe using Asturias' passport.Pablo Picasso arranged his entrance into Paris and Neruda made a surprise appearance there to a stunned World Congress of Peace Forces, while the Chilean government denied that the poet could have escaped the country His fervent Stalinism eventually drove a wedge between Neruda and his long-time friend Octavio Paz, who commented that "Neruda became more and more Stalinist, while I became less and less enchanted with Stalin. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.Neruda was a close advisor to Chile's socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people. Neruda was hospitalised with cancer at the time of the coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet that overthrew Allende's government, but returned home after a few days when he suspected a doctor of injecting him with an unknown substance for the purpose of murdering him on Pinochet's orders. Neruda died in his house in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973, just hours after leaving the hospital. Neruda is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and influential worldwide. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language", and Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the 26 writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon.

This is a fictional plot around the very real character of Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet who, during the 1940's, had also been a senator in the Chilean congress on behalf of the communist party. The film is set in 1948, when the authorities crack down on communists - a time that may be viewed as a chilling precursor to 1970's Pinochet - and the basic plot is about Neruda's escapes from the police, endeavors that force him all over Chile. Luis Gnecco as Neruda is fantastic and so is Mercedes Morán as Delia, Neruda's aristocratic wife. At one level, the film offer a troubling inquiry into the personality of this esteemed poet-intellectual-communist. He is an admired spokesperson for the workers and the downtrodden but he is also a hedonistic drunk and a spoiled womanizer; rough and gentle, strong and weak, Neruda's character and image keeps shifting, and it is to the credit of this film that it never for a moment tries to offer a solution to these complexities. In one memorable episode, a waitress asks Neruda, as he sits at a club-restaurant surrounded by his intellectual-hedonistic friends, suffused with alcohol, whether equality means that everyone will live like he does or whether it means that he, Neruda, will settle for less. I shall not disclose his response.

The camera-work covers a wide range of scenes, from film-noire urban settings to stunning snow covered terrains, all very precisely accompanied by period costumes, designs, motorcycles and horses. However the film aspires, and succeeds, to be by far more than a good period piece. Rather, it is a film about obsession. The psychological roots of this obsession are only hinted to, and this is a good thing too. And the obsessed is Gael García Bernal, playing the detective who relentlessly pursues Neruda. His performance is nothing short of stunning. As the film progresses, and it never rests for a moment, we gradually lose, alongside the characters in the film, any firm grip on reality. Just like in captivating poetic gestures, it becomes less and less clear what is real and what is fiction, what is an event and what is a fantasmatic representation of it, who is a character that actually acts and who is an imaginary ghost. And this is the film's most important achievement.