In the mood for a game of cat and mouse? The law of the jungle doesn’t apply in Pablo Larrain’s meta-portrait of the Chilean poet and political activist, forced in 1948 to go underground and, eventually, into exile.
Luis Gnecco’s Neruda is silver-tongued but no adonis (imagine Alex Salmond in outrageous garb). Ruthless, as well as brave, he’s adept at spinning other people’s anguish into fictional gold (his intelligent, long-suffering spouse refers to herself as “the absurd wife”, resigned to the fact that this is how he will one day portray her). Meanwhile, Oscar (Gael Garcia Bernal), the conservative inspector on Neruda’s tail, is young, sensitive and gorgeous. The twist? He’s not all there.
The car chase scenes are visually stunning (filmed against obviously artificial backdrops, they resemble outlandishly urgent clips from Hitchcock’s The Birds). And what happens to the two men in the Andes is uncannily picturesque. Meanwhile, ordinary people suffer non-metaphysical horrors (we get glimpses of a concentration camp, presided over by the young Pinochet).
Can someone with a voice truly understand the voiceless? In one of the edgiest scenes a fan who’s drunk, miserable and/or mentally unstable (thanks to Ximena Rivas’s beautifully ambiguous cameo, we can’t quite tell) accosts our equality-loving hero and implies he’s swallowed his own hype. Larrain clearly adores Neruda but hasn’t swallowed anything. Man dreams up myth. Start of story.
Cert 15,107 mins
