2016 was a big year for Pablo Larraín, marking the release of three new films, each of them aimed at interpreting the aftermath to a momentous, messily diffuse tragedy. The most high-profile of these is Jackie, a reconfigured biopic that finds the iconic first lady picking up the pieces in the wake of her husband’s assassination, the ghastly sight of the president’s spilled brains transmuted into the visceral juice for a movie that’s otherwise far too staid and reserved. Similar issues plague The Club, in which the titular group is a coven of disgraced priests, hidden away from the public after a major pedophilia scandal. Both of these stories handle their incendiary set-ups with a finesse for reducing controversial subject matter to something safe and predictable, missing the flair and menace of the director’s first few Chilean works.
This panache is not quite regained in Neruda, an at-times phantasmagoric rendering of the famous poet’s period as a political refugee, which nonetheless stands out as the best of the bunch. This film is also a non-traditional tragedy, unfolding during the country’s crackdown on communism in 1947, an event that mirrors the Pinochet-era prohibitions Larraín has covered in previous works. The ban turns Neruda from a popular politician, poet and social gadfly to an outlaw, forced to hide out in the homes of friends, his wife coming along for the ride. Of course, being an outlaw has never precluded having a bit of fun, and the vivacious Neruda continues to amply avail himself of the pleasures of his fame, making only the barest attempts at disguise. His foil and opposite in all this is Inspector Peluchonneau (Gael Garcia Bernal), who throws himself fully into the task of catching Neruda, a quest that’s clearly doomed from the outset.
Despite being cast as the film’s fundamental antagonist, Peluchonneau is also a cipher, a punctilious buttoned-down madman straight out of a Nabokov novel. Yet he’s also presented with surprising tenderness, a fact accentuated by Bernal’s empathetic performance. In establishing the ostensible good guy as abrasive quarry and the bad guy as his somewhat sympathetic pursuer, Larraín not only updates the antihero dynamic of a movie like Tony Manero but flips a familiar chase structure upside down. Neruda is both the hero – the voluminous defender of artistic and personal freedom – and also the villain, the sinister figure against which the pitiful inspector is hopelessly outmatched. As he continues to evade capture in flamboyant fashion, the public’s appreciation for him only grows, leaving the inspector as the dastardly nobody trying to bring down a homegrown Robin Hood. For Peluchonneau, Neruda is everything, but the great man barely seems to realize who his shadow even is.
In shaping this story, Larraín works in a variety of genres and modes, which distracts from the fact that Neruda is mostly a lightweight, often glib study of fame that coasts by on its interesting structural conceit. It’s argument, that the forces of liberal-minded progressivism will always persevere against despotic repression, is countered by an equivalent awareness that the lines between these two sides aren’t always as clear as they seem. It tells the story of a small man going up against a big one, a shades-of-gray tale which casts its conclusion against the bare, endless expanse of the snow-covered Andes. In this uneven conflict, one man is fated to ascend to glory, the other to sink fatally into the cold, consuming powder.
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