Neruda (2016)

Neruda / Pablo Larrain. One of the best movies I have seen in a long, long time. While grounded in the life and history of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), this is a poetic fantasy (a poem in movie form about a poet) that covers the part of Neruda’s life when he fled from Chile in the late 1940s after his country’s fascist government outlawed the Communist Party and sent a young police inspector to capture him. Inspector Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal), who narrates, is the man given the job of finding Neruda and arresting him. Neruda, himself (Luis Gnecco), doesn’t want to be caught but enjoys the thrill of the chase. As the cat-and-mouse game goes on, the events, the thoughts, the motivations get more dreamlike. Music (as in Larrain’s “Jackie”) plays an enormous part in setting the mood. To repeat my previous metaphor, I felt like I was experiencing a poem on the movie screen. It is not easy to describe; most of the professional reviews I have looked at describe the movie in realistic terms of a police manhunt. Nothing could be further from what I experienced in the theater. This may take some time to digest but my first impression is that this is a fine and great film.