Neruda as myth
Film program group member For better or worse, big screen biopics are a fashionable way to get your history these days.
Yet despite their popularity, there are many perils to depicting and dramatizing the lives of influential people on screen.
Most of them are the inevitable consequence of condensing a lifetime into something that clocks in at less than two hours. Then there’s the challenge of generating enough drama to hold the attention of audiences. This tends for biopics to focus on epic moments in the lives of their subjects, embellishing some facts and conveniently eliminating others that don’t fit the time constraint or match the pacing and arc of conventional storytelling. The predictable formulas employed to hold it all together regularly turn biopics into grandiose exercises in myth making and lead to some pretty trite, tired and uninventive films.
You might expect a film titled Neruda, about the legendary Chilean poet and political force, to be especially susceptible to the biopic’s romantic failings, but director Pablo Larraín aims to surprise.
This incandescent film manages to give audiences a sense of Neruda’s character, along with the age that he lived in, but it is much more intent on exploring how myths are made.
Neruda is arguably Chile’s most famous author. An international literary giant, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. The film takes place in a span of just more than a year shortly after the Second World War when Neruda, though a democratically elected senator, was forced into exile because he was a Communist Party member and deemed a traitor by a Chilean government under pressure from the United States.
Luis Gnecco plays Neruda as both an indulgent hedonist and a passionate activist committed to a fairer social system. Neruda’s efforts to realize his political ideals conflate with his ego and his sense that he’s destined for the pages of history. Gnecco brings out human dimensions of the character in several wild party scenes where he reluctantly acquiesces to requests
to recite one of his famous poems. This is acting that you’re acting — tough to pull off convincingly — but Gnecco owns these moments.
While living underground, Neruda is doggedly pursued by police inspector Oscar Peluchonneau, understatedly played by Gael García Bernal. Peluchonneau is the iconic film noir detective, dapper and filled with youthful enthusiasm for the chase. Though we’re not sure until we’re well along, it’s his thoughts that provide the voiceover threading through the film.
Though Neruda’s pursuit by Peluchonneau is what propels the story, there are soon tips that things aren’t what they seem. One of the most ingenious is Larraín’s use of rear-projected backgrounds in the driving scenes. This technique is immediately evocative of a bygone Hollywood era and signals to us that we’re watching something fabricated, that there’s fakery and artifice in this story despite the attention to production design that has lavishly recreated the dress, the furnishings, and the streets of 1940s Chile.
Larraín’s long-time collaborator and director of photography, Sergio Armstrong, makes an incredible contribution by manoeuvring cameras so images skim across the screen with inspired grace and elegance. Taking measured opportunities to exploit the power of digital filmmaking, Armstrong masterfully manipulates light. He enhances shadows to silhouettes and tints scenes with faded patinas while beams of sunshine penetrate scene after scene. The cumulative effect is ethereal.
At the film’s finale, inspector Peluchonneau comes to the realization — along with the audience — that we all have roles in creating myths. The myths that endure survive not because of our interest in individual lives, but because the ideas that some individuals share captivate the imagination.