Neruda
FilmScene — opens Friday, March 24 at 4 p.m.
The bio-drama Neruda will be opening at FilmScene on March 24 for a special one-week engagement in Iowa City.
Neruda is a metafictional tale directed by Chilean-born filmmaker Pablo Lorraín, who recently filmed Jackie (2016), based on Jacqueline Kennedy and the aftermath of her husband John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Neruda stars Gael García Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries, Fidel) as police detective Óscar Peluchonneau, who attempts to arrest revolutionary poet and politician Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) as he goes underground in his native Chile during the late 1940s. The screenplay, written by Guillermo Calderón, does not try to encapsulate the poet’s life from cradle to grave, but focuses on just one chapter.
Pablo Neruda is the pen name of Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, born on July 12, 1904 in the town of Perral, Chile, and since been heralded as “the most prolific, influential, and inventive poet of the Spanish language” (The New York Times Book Review, 1969). His English translators Ben Belitt and Donald W. Walsh christened him, respectively, “the conscience of a continent” and “the Homer of our times.” For his contribution to the world of letters, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971.
Neruda’s father was a railroad worker; his mother, a school teacher, died shortly after her son was born. As a teenager, he wrote newspaper articles and soon turned his pen to writing poetry. He adopted the name Neruda to honor the Czechoslovakian poet Jan Neruda (1834-1891), publishing his first book, Crepusculario, in 1923. From 1927-1935, he travelled abroad after he was placed in charge of numerous honorary consulships by the Chilean government. It would prove to be a tough period for him. As he developed his literary voice, he was forced by the world around him to develop a political consciousness, as fascism threatened to envelop the world.
Lorraín’s film touches on events rarely discussed in American cinema. Students of history are familiar with the fascism of Italy and Nazism in Germany, but not as many know of the Right-wing totalitarianism of Spain and Chile (and other nations) following the defeat of the former two countries during the second World War. The film, which made its world premiere at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival last May, provides value as entertainment. But it opens doors to a past that is new to English-speaking audiences, and yet at the same time a vision very similar to what is unfolding in the world today.
Neruda championed the Spanish Republican cause, “lending intellectual prestige to the government,” according to journalist David Mitchell in his 1982 book The Spanish Civil War. While serving as the Chilean consul in Madrid, he was nearly captured by a “hit squad” in a restaurant. He escaped, although it was not the only time he laid his life on the line. He penned anti-fascist verses including “Spain in Our Hearts” (1937), a work deemed by Walsh, Neruda’s English translator for The Captain’s Verses: The Love Poems, as “one of the noblest expressions of the agony of the Spanish Republic.” Although the Republic fell into the hands of the fascists led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco in 1939, the fight against fascism did not die in the hearts of the Spanish people.
The film does not shy away from Neruda’s politics, especially concerning the impassioned polemics delivered by Neruda and his comrades in the film. An unapologetic Communist and defender of the Soviet Union, Neruda was at times a combination of Chilean citizen, internationalist and man-without-a-country. Neruda returned to Chile in 1943. Despite the paranoid politics of the “Cold War” between the capitalist United States and the socialist Soviet Union, he joined the Communist Party of Chile and was elected senator of the Republic in 1945.
Neruda is referred to as “Caligula” by political opponents for his hedonistic lifestyle, which some say undermined his literary message and politics. However, others defend his private life due to the impact of his words in fighting hunger, poverty and injustice. Toward the beginning of the film, Chilean President González Videla describes Neruda’s influence among Chilean workers during his election campaign: “This man would pull a piece of paper out of his pocket and 10,000 workers would go silent to hear him recite poetry in that voice of his.”
For his opposition to what he perceived as a betrayal by the government (in particular President Videla’s brutal repression of striking miners in 1947), Neruda was accused of treason. If caught the poet risked 541 days in jail, which would leave him unable to write and help “organize the resistance.” He was aided by comrades and strangers alike in escaping the clutches of oppression in hopes of returning one day to help build a new nation, and maybe one day a new world.
Peluchonneau was set to arrest him. Serving as the film’s narrator, Peluchonneau explains Neruda’s motives in life: “The poet gave them words to tell about their lives. Their harsh lives. And these words gave meaning to their nightmares. That’s why he did it. To give them a voice.”
In Bernal’s previous films The Motorcycle Diaries and Fidel he portrayed the Argentine Communist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara. This time, Bernal is on the other side of the law as the police detective obsessed with capturing Neruda on the president’s orders “to catch him and humiliate him,” to make an example of him on behalf of the government and, more importantly, the Chilean aristocracy whose interests it served. Many in power feared what kind of influence Neruda would have on an audience unrestricted by national boundaries.
At one point in the film, Neruda says: “I won’t play the fascists’ game. I’ll become their worst nightmare. In order to do that, I need to be a popular giant.”
One example of Neruda’s political verse can be found in the 1950 poem “The United Fruit Co.,” written the same year he was awarded the International Peace Prize. The poem reflected Neruda’s feelings that the encroachment of American industries was turning Latin America into “banana republics” (essentially corporate-owned colonies), and that their populations were being exploited for profit, including by the American corporation inspiring the poem’s title. Neruda walked a literary high wire, balancing poetry and propaganda in a stunning display.
To paraphrase a line from the film, people do not remember poems about love, “they remember the poems of rage.”
The enigma of Neruda’s life has inspired numerous fictionalized accounts, including the novel The Neruda Case by University of Iowa Professor of Creative Writing Roberto Ampuero. Born in Valparaiso, Chile, Ampuero recalled that when he woke up for school every day as a young boy, “I’d glimpse Pablo Neruda’s house through my bedroom, high up on one of Valparaiso’s fifty hills.” He describes Neruda’s house as “mysterious and solitary,” as “no one was ever seen to exit.”
As a young man, Ampuero was forced out of Chile as an exile during Pinochet’s bloody coup. In 2011, along with his teaching duties at the University, he was appointed Chilean ambassador to Mexico. The Neruda Case is Ampuero’s first novel translated into English, with the help of Carolina De Robertis. The Neruda Case was a way for Ampuero to creatively reconcile for himself never knocking on Neruda’s door to try and speak with “the most important living poet of the Spanish language.”
Under the left-leaning government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973), Neruda was appointed as the nation’s ambassador to France. Allende was overthrown in a military coup backed by the US Government, resulting in Allende’s murder and the installation of General Augusto Pinochet. (But that is a subject worthy of further cinematic exploration). It was not long before Neruda died from cancer in a hospital on September 23, 1973. “He died of cancer, but also from the pain of watching the tragic end of his political dream,” Ampuero writes.
As for the film, it is only the beginning of a long worthwhile journey. As Neruda concluded his 1971 Nobel lecture:
“Lastly, I wish to say to the people of good will, to the workers, to the poets, that the whole future has been expressed in this line by Rimbaud: only with a burning patience can we conquer the splendid City which will give light, justice and dignity to all mankind.
“In this way the song will not have been sung in vain.”
Neruda runs at FilmScene through Thursday, March 30. Tickets are $6.50-9.
