Fiction meets real life in Neruda, Academy Award nominated Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s latest film, which was screened at Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) on December 8.
Pablo Neruda’s love poetry resonates with people far and wide today. But three years after the Second World War, which is where the story takes place, Neruda was less of a romantic and more of a poet of the people.
We see him as a politician and diplomat in 1948, who has to go into hiding as Chile’s most famous communist, when the country’s president Gabriel Gonzalez Videla wants him hunted down and killed. He sends after him, police detective Oscar Peluchonneau, who is hard on the poet’s trail albeit always a couple of steps behind. Neruda leaves him books of his own poetry at every scene, with a personal note on the cover page, as if taunting him to see his own place in the puzzle. The story unravels beautifully, with Luis Gnecco’s Neruda masterfully captivating a whole country just by changing the timbre of his voice and using poetry as a rallying cry.
“Like a torrent of sunbursts,” he says, “An Amazon of buried jaguars, leave me crying: hours, days and years, blind ages, stellar centuries.”
Even the doggedly determined detective, played by Gael García Bernal, is compelled to wonder whose side he is on, by the end of the movie.
You get to meet Pablo Picasso in the film, as Neruda’s confidante and friend from France. Augusto Pinochet also makes an appearance as the commander of a concentration camp.
With truth blending into fiction, and the constant thread of poetry woven in from start to finish, the film is a work of art.
