Happy Father's Day! Here's an unrelated movie! The poster makes it look like Gael Garcia Bernal is playing Neruda and he is not. This also threw me.
Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) is a renowned poet, a Communist, and a senator, in that order. After publishing a scathing poem criticizing the fascist turn of the President (Alfredo Castro), an arrest order is put out and a young, ambitious policeman (Gael Garcia Bernal) is assigned to pursue the poet. It's more difficult than he imagines, however, as his quarry proves to be wily and also playful, leaving autographed books at all the places he was almost caught.
This is the most literary chase movie you will probably ever see. There is a near-constant voiceover from the policeman's POV that is desperate, smug, jealous, and admiring by turns. Neruda is almost mythic in his mind, even as the audience is shown his very human foibles.
It became very apparent to me as the movie went on that I knew absolutely Fuck All about South American politics, history, or culture. It's just a huge blind spot for me (probably because if we taught it in schools, we'd have to acknowledge the absolutely damning role the U.S. played in a lot of it and we hate that). The movie does a very good job of contextualizing, however, and I never felt lost even as I knew there were depths to the material. I like Pablo Lorrain as a director very much. He's becoming one of my favorites.
Neruda is available for streaming on Kanopy for free, if you have a library card. It's worth it.
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