‘This has to become a wild hunt’
Neruda tells the twisty tale of the Chilean writer and a fictional officer
Can two characters have onscreen chemistry if they never meet on screen? There’s a case to be made for it in Neruda, Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s twisty, literary examination of one of his country’s most famous poets and statesmen.
The film, set in 1948, unfolds as a tug of war between the title character, played by Neruda lookalike Luis Gnecco, and a fictional police detective tasked with finding the poet when the political winds shift, sending the Communist senator into hiding.
The policeman, named Oscar Peluchonneau and played by Gael Garcia Bernal, is actually fictional in two different ways. Prosaically, he is a made-up character for the film in the way that Neruda is not. But on the other hand — poetically, I guess you could say — he is also a construct within the film.
“I come from a blank page,” he says in one of his many voiceovers, imaging that he was perhaps born of a famous police chief and a prostitute. “I come for my black ink.” The suggestion is that Neruda may have invented his own nemesis — and how better to keep one step (or one page) ahead of him?
When we first meet Senator Neruda, he is arguing lustily with other statesmen about political corruption and American influence in their government. Threatened with arrest, he decides to disappear rather than be jailed. But, he concludes, “this has to become a wild hunt.”
Enter Peluchonneau, one of apparently 300 police officers sent to find him, though pretty much the only one we ever see in the film. With his tidy moustache and a fedora tilted just so, he is a bit of a dandy, and in one scene manages to walk right past his quarry, who is “disguised” as a photograph of himself.
Neruda proves to be almost as bad at hiding as Peluchonneau is at seeking. Rather than spend all his time indoors with his saintlypatient wife (Mercedes Morán), he thinks nothing of slipping outside for a stroll or to visit a brothel. The common people do not report him, although they do try his patience by constantly requesting Tonight I Can Write, a “greatest hit” poem written when he was 20.
Larraín has been busy of late. His English-language debut, Jackie, opens across Canada on Jan. 27; The Club, a drama about disgraced clergy, had a brief theatrical run last year. Neruda is perhaps the least accessible of the three, though it’s hardly opaque. Even if you’ve only heard of the poet’s sonnets
or his Stalinist leanings, you don’t need much in the way of introduction to enjoy this metanarrative.
And Peluchonneau’s obsession with his prey is wonderful to behold. After Neruda’s ex-wife refuses to denounce him on the radio, the policeman pulls her away from the mic and addresses the nation himself, but the worst he can bring himself to say about Neruda is that the man is “a public menace and an unforgettable lover.”
His plan to have Neruda’s ex vilify him has failed.
“This is how the strategy of plot geniuses falls apart,” he moans in voice-over. Within the movie, that may be true. But viewed from the audience, this is one more example of how it all comes together.