Neru­da

With his films Tony Manero, Post Mortem and No, direc­tor Pablo Larraín mas­tered the art of talk­ing about his coun­try, Chile, while it was under the rule of Augus­to Pinochet, while sel­dom speak­ing the despot’s name direct­ly. In the same way that a black hole is an absence of light, only vis­i­ble from the flick­ers that sur­round it, so too is Larraín’s Pinochet intan­gi­ble but ever-present.

The direc­tor has tak­en quite the oppo­site approach with his two most recent films, plac­ing his sub­jects front and cen­tre in two remark­able pieces of work. To refer to either of them as biopics would be mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tive. Though his arch Eng­lish-lan­guage debut, Jack­ie, is the more cel­e­brat­ed of the two, it’s dif­fi­cult to resist the twin­kling eye and sweep­ing lyri­cism of Neru­da, which is both com­ple­men­tary to its Amer­i­can cousin and brac­ing in its own way.

Larraín has claimed that Chileans, ​“don’t build mon­u­ments” – even to the famous left­ist writer. Instead, trib­ute is paid to Pablo Neruda’s mem­o­ry by mix­ing an exquis­ite and irrev­er­ent cock­tail of his pas­sions: poet­ry, pol­i­tics and pulp. Admit­ted­ly, the basic premise is ground­ed in real­i­ty. Don Pablo (Luis Gnec­co) is a Com­mu­nist sen­a­tor, but goes on the lam when the par­ty is banned by the pres­i­dent they helped elect, Gabriel González Videla (a brief cameo from the director’s reg­u­lar muse, Alfre­do Cas­tro). Larraín is not inter­est­ed in a his­tor­i­cal chron­i­cle of events, though. His con­cern is more viva­cious and impressionistic.

In Neru­da he sketch­es both man and icon; a slave to base desires, as well as the fig­ure­head who his fel­low Chileans con­sid­er to be one with their very land, rather than raised above them in bronze. Neru­da was appar­ent­ly an avid read­er of detec­tive fic­tion, and this affec­tion frames a huge­ly enjoy­able fugi­tive nar­ra­tive. Hot on his trail, and pro­vid­ing an absurd dead­pan voiceover, is Pre­fect Oscar Pelu­chon­neau (Gael García Bernal) fresh from the pages of a dime-store novel.

“Half-moron, half-idiot,” he’s a Clouse­au-esque nin­com­poop with a pitch per­fect gait and self-seri­ous mous­tache. He bris­tles ridicu­lous­ly at Neruda’s pol­i­tics (“Com­mu­nists hate to work; they’d rather burn church­es”) and bour­geois hedo­nism, but not enough to resist infat­u­a­tion. As the paper­back caper tran­scends into a hall of mir­rors, their iden­ti­ties become inex­tri­ca­bly entwined: cop and crim­i­nal, cat and mouse, char­ac­ter and creator.

The title may appear sim­ple but it is entire­ly delib­er­ate. Rear-pro­jec­tion and loca­tions that switch with­out a break in the dia­logue, or any expla­na­tion, could be for­mal tics, but they are more like­ly echoes of a care­ful­ly con­struct­ed real­i­ty and sig­nals of a writer recon­sid­er­ing his scene set­ting and amend­ing his screen­play in front of the audi­ence. It becomes ever more prob­a­ble that the writer in ques­tion is Neru­da him­self, a mae­stro lead­ing a cast of char­ac­ters on a mer­ry chase: ​“The poet has the fever of artis­tic spir­its, who tend to think the world is some­thing imagined.”

In a soci­ety that bandies around the term ​‘post-truth’ and obsess­es over the cult of per­son­al­i­ty, Neru­da makes a fas­ci­nat­ing one-two punch with Jack­ie – these are films express­ly engag­ing with fal­li­ble nation­al icons who are deeply engaged with craft­ing their own epic legends