Neruda

 I don't pretend to understand Pablo Larrain's 2016 Neruda.  The film's premise, that the policeman and the poet are reciprocally dependent on each another, seems highly questionable to me and I can't quite make the idea work.  Larrain is a great director and Neruda is made with immense authority and is full of remarkable imagery -- indeed, the film's last twenty minutes achieves a sort of ghostly grandeur that is unlike most anything in film.  (Neruda's escape over the mountain pass reminded me of the last scene in Renoir's The Grand Illusion and the climax of Scorsese's Kundun at the border between Tibet and Nepal, but these are only approximately relevant and the connections between these films final sequences are more tonal than thematic.)  This is the kind of picture that inspires you to learn more about its subject matter and I expect to look into historical and literary aspects of the film in the next few weeks.  I regard a film as successful if it inspires you to learn more about its subject matter even, though, on first viewing I'm not sure what to make of the picture.

We first meet Neruda as a Senator in the Chilean congress.  He strides into a palatial toilet at the legislature where he is asked by his fellow representatives to justify his Communist support of Soviet Russia.  Neruda defends the Soviet Union for liberating the working man and saving Europe in the World War -- this film begins in 1948. (Apparently, the President was elected with the support of Neruda and the Communists but has now embarked on persecution of Reds.) Later, we see Neruda at this villa where he and his wife, Delia, are hosting a spectacularly wild and decadent party.  Neruda is dressed as Lawrence of Arabia and everyone demands that he recite a love poem that will be come a leit motif in the movie -- verse that begins "Tonight I write the saddest verse..."  (Apparently, this is an enormous hit in the Spanish-speaking world and people are always asking the poet to recite these lines.)  At the party, Neruda assumes the mantle of the great poet, intoning his verse in a rapturous and legato baritone -- it's as if he's acting the role of the poet, indulging in sort of vatic ecstasy that is similar to the way Yeats read his poems in public. Neruda knows that all the adulation of the frivolous Communist intelligentsia will not protect him in the slightest  The film is narrated with voice-over by someone who seems to both detest and love Neruda -- after about ten minutes, we  learn that the bemused narrator is a detective employed by the regime to hunt Neruda down and either kill or deliver him to the authorities; this man is Oscar Peluchonneau, the son of a prostitute ("I am the son of venereal disease") who has assumed the name of an important right-wing figure in Chilean history and fantasizes that he may be that hero's son.  Oscar is watching the wild house-party, tailing Neruda.  The poet goes to see the former president of Chile, a plutocrat who reports that the United States has told Chile to start killing Communists.  The former president, previously a Leftist, seems to have switched sides.  Neruda is advised to flee Santiago and, with Delia, is driven to the border in the Andes with Argentina.  But Neruda's passport in his actual name (Ricardo Reyes) doesn't match his identity card and so he's turned away.  Returning to Santiago, he hides out at safe house, a modest place that he finds claustrophobic.  (A long-suffering Communist bodyguard, Jara, is ordered to supervise the poet.)  Neruda sends letters about his plight to the Comintern and Pablo Picasso with whom he is friends; we later see Picasso at a party meeting denouncing the repressive regime in Chile.  Neruda is a habitue of brothels and goes to a whorehouse to entertain himself.  There he meets a transvestite male prostitute who sings a song for him and pleads with him to recite his famous love poem.  Later, Oscar, who is now hunting for Neruda, interrogates the male prostitute who with tears in his eyes say that Neruda talked with him "man to man", and saluted him as a fellow "art worker"; "a fucking dog like you can never understand," he says to the detective.  By this time, Communists are being arrested and hauled away to a horrible-looking concentration camp in the Atacama desert.  (The camp is ruled by the youthful Augusto Pinochet who will appear as "the Count" in Larrain's recent vampire movie.)  The detective pressgangs Neruda's ex-wife into a radio appearance.  But, instead of denouncing her ex-husband (whom she bitterly claims "owes (her) millions"), she says that Neruda is a great man.  Neruda flees to Valparaiso where, again, he wanders around the town to the dismay of Jara.  Oscar interrogates a Spanish Communist who inadvertently reveals that Neruda is hiding in Valparaiso.  So, with several cops, Oscar travels to that place.  On various occasions, Neruda leaves books of poetry inscribed to Oscar, whom he begins to regard, in some way, as his brother.  (Oscar is something of a poet in his own right and admires his adversary's verse.)  By this time, Neruda is writing "poems of rage" having turned away from the love poetry that made him famous.  In one poem, he intones quiero castigado -- "I demand that they be punished."  But the only people who seem to be punished are the poor working class stiffs in Valparaiso who are brutalized by the cops and dragged off to prison camps.  Neruda doesn't do well in confinement and he quarrels viciously with Delia his wife -- she's the person who converted him to Communism.  Neruda tells Delia that she's smothering him and encourages her to kill herself so that he won't hate her so much.  (Picasso and Neruda where great men but bad boyfriends.)  Delia is stronger than Neruda in many ways, takes this in stride, and knows she will outlive her husband by forty years.  Neruda grows a beard and takes on the identity of an ornithologist, fleeing with a couple of fellow-travelers south to cross the border with Argentina in the fjords and glaciers in Tierra del Fuego.  In Valparaiso, Oscar interviews Delia who says that the cop is merely a "supporting character" in the fable of Neruda's life and he will be forgotten while the poet will be famous forever.   Oscar is now in hot pursuit all alone, riding a motorcycle filmed against surreal-looking rear projection.  In the wintry wilderness, Neruda hides at a ranch and, then, is taken on  horseback to the border with Argentina.  (It's worth the price of admission to see the poet attempting to mount a pony -- it doesn't go well.)  On the trek across a wooded snowy wasteland, Oscar comes very close to catching Neruda.  The two men exchange shouted hoots and greetings at the glacial pass.  One of Neruda's supporters among the local sheep-farmers bashes Oscar over the head and the policeman is badly wounded.  He gets up staggers toward the mountain pass but, then, dies in the snow.  The dying police officer has a vision in which he imagines that he is a mere supporting character in a book written by the poet.  Neruda, filmed in a spectacular fresco of men against the gloomy white of the mountains, kneels by Oscar and commends him -- he says that Oscar "wrote the snow" and "wrote the horses" and was his essential "inspector and persecutor."  This speech mirrors Oscar's litany that Neruda has written for him a fabulous epic, with animals, with snow, with red blood on the  white, with trees and with music" (cue a dirge with these words).  Later, we see Neruda in Paris with Picasso and Notre Dame in the background.  As he is buried in the mountains, Oscar's voice-over says that 'no one will ever know my name."  But in Paris, Neruda imagines Oscar telling him to "say my name" and, so, he does.  We see Delia painting a large canvas with horses on it.  Neruda mourns the fact that his fame is not based on his love poems, but "(his) poems of rage."  There's a flashback to the Santiago whorehouse where he recites the poem about the "saddest lines he has ever written."   The movie ends with a scarlet throbbing flashback of Oscar in a cheap hotel in Valparaiso with a red neon sign fitfully illumining his handsome features. 

The film suggests that the poet is dependent on the figure of the persecutor, the hunter who tracks him.  I don't know what this is supposed to mean.  (The interplay between the hunter and hunted has a distinctly Borgesian tint, something that is somewhat ironic, since Borges took care to never interact with Neruda when he was in Argentina -- Borges was anti-communist and despised Neruda as a "very mean man.") The film is beautiful, beginning with hazy, bleached imagery in Santiago, the camera tracking Neruda as he strolls like a flaneur through the old streets of the city.  Valparaiso is mean and impoverished, full of miserable-looking workers persecuted by equally miserable-looking soldiers.  The scenes in the mountains, with constant rain at the lower elevations and huge globular snowflakes among the glaciers, are so cold that I took a chill watching them.  The movie has a languorous dream-like quality, contributed to by the sorrowful elegiac music and the poetic and visionary verse on the soundtrack.  (When Neruda crosses a fjord-like lake on a boat, with Oscar pursuing him on the road parallel to the water, we have entered the lake country around Puntas Arenas that features so notably in Larrain's 2023 El Conde.)  Neruda is unprepossessing a pudgy little man with bulging eyes and owlish eyebrows -- but his verse makes men weep and women plead to kiss him.  (The idolatry with which Neruda is met is an artifact of a bygone world in which high art mattered, even to people almost illiterate, but its somewhat alien to an American viewer in 2023.)  At the end of the movie, we see people reading Neruda's poems in jail, including poor Jara who is in a sort of cage.  The film's faith is that poetry sustains the world, that it upholds the world's beauty and righteousness and that it is poetry that summons things to be real and to stand in the truth.  This is a highly mystical conception of poetry, an Emersonian elevation of human nature to the divine, and it's inspiring if also daunting and mysterious.