Telluride at Dartmouth Film: "Neruda"
An unconventional biopic about the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet, starring Gael Garcia-Bernal as the detective tracking him down for being a communist.
Charged with treason in 1948, Chile’s acclaimed poet and leftist Senator Pablo Neruda goes into hiding. Director Pablo Larraín (No) sees these events through the eyes of a resentful cop giving obsessive chase. The marvelous Luis Gnecco plays Neruda with eloquence and comic intelligence, and Gael García Bernal does the same as his pursuer, a secret sharer of Neruda’s imagination. With a script that echoes Brecht and Borges, Larraín fashions a lyrical political essay, a sly tribute to film noir and an intricate meditation on the irresolvable tension between aesthetic and political desire. Just 39 years old, Larraín has made four fine films in eight years. But this astonishing reinvention of the biopic is undoubtedly his masterpiece to date. (Chile, subtitled, 2016, 107m) Courtesy of Orchard
