Pablo Larrain’s frustratingly opaque film, from a screenplay by Guillermo Calderón, flirts with a classic Hunter & the Hunted story as renowned Chilean poet & Senator, Pablo Neruda, is faced with arrest or self-exile during a Communist crackdown by the newly installed Government. Between failed border crossings, Neruda indulges in bad behavior & bacchanals (brothels over bride), while waiting in various hiding places for the next organized attempt to sneak him out of the country makes its way down ‘the Party Line.’ Neruda, a loyal Stalinist to the end. (Ironic when you compare Right-Wing Chile’s political oppression & deadly purges to Stalin’s.) But the key to the film isn’t Luis Gnecco’s indulgent, implacable Neruda but Gael Garcia Bernal’s police inspector, obsessive & cunning in pursuit, showing the twisted principles of LES MISÉRABLES’ Inspector Jarvert and even developing some of the personality transference Hugo gave his detective, trudging ever onwards, past the limits of his own conflicted makeup. But Larrain sees that his fictionalized, compressed conceit isn’t adding up, and literally starts obfuscating; fogging up city atmosphere, pointlessly circling subjects with his camera, and only achieving visual clarity once Neruda reaches the final leg of his journey on the snowy Andes; Bernal in cold pursuit. A little bit of Neruda poetry is thrown in along the way, but not enough to hurt anyone.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Neruda seems more interesting seen from the side as a supporting character in the witty, sentimental romance of IL POSTINO/’94. With Philippe Noiret wryly turning a Nobel Prize winning poet into a self-help love guru.
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