First they come for the poet. Pablo Larrain’s “Neruda” is set in the late 1940s when Chile, under the sway of the US, launched a crackdown on communists. The poet Pablo Neruda – rotund, pompous, mythical, cocky and possessing the booming voice that captivates the proletariat across the nation – is the prime target of President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla, who orders his chief policeman to bring in the famous communist. Aided by the Party, Neruda runs away with the aim of crossing the Andes into Argentina, and the cat-and-mouse chase across Chile is the basis of this stylish and melancholy caper that just had its premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight section of Cannes.
Suddenly the question erupted, why isn’t the film in the main competition? Cannes’ logic in film programming is sometimes a great mystery, and “Neruda” surely deserves a bigger spot in the official selection. To boot, the film has come out at the right time: this month, the result of the forensic investigation of Neruda’s remains will be revealed, which will determine whether the poet was actually poisoned by the secret police in 1973 not long after General Pinochet staged a coup and took over the country from an elected president.
But the event depicted in “Neruda” takes place long before that. And in fact, the film feels fresh and startling because it chooses not just to tell the story from Neruda’s point of view (despite the title and his looming presence) but even more so from the interior monologue of Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael Garcia Bernal), the detective charged with hunting down the poet. The film shifts back and forth between Neruda’s escape – how the “fat communist”, with theatrical brashness, relishes the chance of adventure in fleeing from one safe house to another, while sneaking out at night to recite his poems to adoring hookers in baroque brothels – and Peluchonneau’s narration of his hopeless pursuits. We soon realise that both the poet and the policeman see the whole thing as a chance to romanticize their missions, to imbue them with grandiose meanings that will enrich their lives. Peluchonneau, somehow, becomes the tragic hero of this desperate quest – a son of a prostitute who sees himself as a Don Quixote, or a savage detective, chasing after the shadow of a great man with the hope of putting his own name down in history.
The two lead performances make the catch-me-if-you-can narrative so engaging: Luis Gnecco as Neruda, so vain, so profligate, so god-like in the eyes of the peasants look up to him and his political poems; and Bernal as Peluchonneau, so sad, so well-dressed, and so dumb. But it’s Larrain’s filmmaking that gives the story a ravishing texture that borders between historical reminiscence and a vintage photobook. The back streets of Santiago, the squalor of Valparaiso, the snowy field of the Andes, populated by gauchos and crazy millionaires – “Neruda” is about the poet, the detective, and also the country going through great uncertainty. This is, of course, Larrain’s forte; all his films take on the troubled chapters in Chilean history and give them an angled perspective, famously in the Pinochet-era trilogy “Tony Manero”, “Post Mortem” and “No”.
And fittingly, another Chilean film in the Directors’ Fortnight takes up the period right after the one in “Neruda”. Alenjandro Jodorowsky’s “Endless Poetry” is the director’s eccentric, honest and endearing autobiography of the Chilean filmmaker who has a cult-like following who grew up in the 1950s and who became a figure in the avant-garde/underground art movement of his country. The film tells Jodorowsky’s life story as a young poet – before he moved to Paris and took up filmmaking – living in the giddy swirl of modernist aspirants, mad artists, half-crazed naked women, circus clowns and even dwarves. Students of Latin American poetry will recognize Chilean literary masters in the film: Nicarno Parra, who Jodorowsky adores, and Enrique Lihn, who was the filmmaker’s friend and performing buddy. Told in Jodorwosky’s oddball, exaggerated style, the film however becomes a touching portrait of an artist as a young man, wild, confused, nearly lost in the currents of history, and yet emerging from them if not confident then at least hopeful.
I sincerely urge Thai distributors or festival programmers to bring these two films to Thai cinemas, because they will be the talking points everywhere in the months to come.
