By Austin Henderson
As the action in Neruda begins, Pablo Larraín transports us 69 years back to the Chile of 1948. As omnipresent as the Stetson hats is the sweeping fear of the red menace: communism.Steeped in the backdrop of the film is the dichotomous nature of the time. Even in the “nonaligned” nations of South America, the Cold War tensions run high. Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco), embedded in the plight of the country’s poor, has aligned himself with the country’s labor unions and socialist politics. In an incendiary speech to the Senate, he attacks the politics of President Gabriel González Videla. Videla, in turn, calls for the arrest of Neruda for treason.
After hearing of the arrest warrant, Neruda, along with other members of the Communist Party, plan an elaborate escape route for the poet to reach safety across the border. The plot line of the film centers on the cat and mouse game between Neruda and fascist Police Commissioner Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal), who has been tasked with bringing Neruda to justice.
Despite his symbolic importance to the workers of Chile, Neruda hardly seems to be representative of the proletarian struggle. Showing that even the vanguard left is distanced from the life of the workers, we are shown a “man of the people” who attends bacchanalian orgies and rubs shoulders with European artists such as Pablo Picasso.
As the workers of the party transport him clandestinely out of the country, this inequality becomes apparent. One woman even goes so far as to question, “After the revolution, will we all live like him or like me? One who has cleaned the shit of the bourgeoisie since she was 11.”
While initially sympathetic to Neruda, with his poetic tendencies, he is a character that undergoes very little development in the audience’s eyes. Instead, we see a man locked into his own pretensions. The police chief, however, develops greatly in this cat-and-mouse game.
Throughout, we are gifted with a look into the detective’s mind, which acts as an omniscient retrospective narrator. At first, the detective seems a distasteful character, a vain, prideful man, who in his chase for personal glory acts as a willing vehicle for the government’s oppression. However, as the movie goes on, a sense of — if not empathy — pity develops for the police chief.
In his single-minded obsessive pursuit of the poet, he discovers that he is but another piece in the great poem the writer has created for a life. Which is the hunter and which is the hunted, when the hunted orchestrates every bit of the endeavor? In each narrow escape, Neruda leaves a breadcrumb of a poetry book for the police chief to find.
In the arc of the story, Peluchonneau learns that he has been forced to the side, becoming a mere backdrop upon which the poet is able to shine. Sensing in his sullen narration that he was there only to perform as the antihero of the story, the obstacle against which this Chilean Odysseus would prevail, he remarks, “I don’t care that he created me — that he made me a secondary character.”
In the telling way that each of us writes ourselves into our own stories, Peluchonneau, too, realizes some form of autonomy.
“I created myself, too. And I did it badly. I invented a life for myself, alone, without love. But the poet invented me as furious, full of wind.”
As the chase culminates in the snowfield of the Andes, Neruda directs the plot yet again. As the police chief observes, “He wants to see me. He’s curious. He can’t miss his ending.”