Neruda - a film review

“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand”

-      Plato

Chile in the 20^th century was a land of great political turmoil. With a string of coups, military dictatorships and counter-revolutions, Chile didn’t see stability until the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990 – an almost 3 decade reign filled with murders, tortures and iron-booted authoritarianism.

But all times of turmoil bring forth outstanding people. Pablo Neruda is one such, whose reputation both as a poet and a revolutionary has spread across the globe.

Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, who took his nom de plume from the influential 19^th century Czech poet Jan Neruda, was a passionate poet and a politician for the Communist party and later friend and close advisor to the staunch and principled socialist president Salvador Allende, who was overthrown by Pinochet in a military coup on the 11^th of September, 1973. Kissinger and Nixon’s involvement in this disgraceful episode and their efforts of illegal subversion to unseat a democratically elected president, is still woefully underappreciated.

As low-flying jet fighters destroyed the Presidential Palace in Santiago, instead of succumbing and perhaps saving his own life, Allende made his final broadcast over the radio before committing suicide:

“This is certainly the last time I shall speak to you . . . History has given me a choice. I shall sacrifice my life in loyalty to my people, in the knowledge that the seeds we planted in the noble consciousness of thousands of Chileans can never be prevented from bearing fruit . . . Much sooner than later, the great avenues towards a new society will open again, and the march along that road will continue.”

Neruda died days later, on September the 23^rd, officially via cardiac arrest brought on by his prostate cancer. However, evidence suggest that the Nobel laureate was murdered by the dictatorship for his close affiliation of the ousted Allende government.

However, it is more than 20 years earlier, in 1948 that the Pablo Larraín directed film, Neruda, sets its scene. In 1948, the Chilean president Gabriel González Videla enacted the ironically named Ley de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia (Permanent Defence of Democracy Law), which outlawed the Communist Party of Chile and banned more than 25,000 people from the electoral list. The detention camp at Pisagua, which was used during Carlos Ibáñez del Campo’s soft dictatorship in the 1920’s and would be again in Pinochet’s bloody reign, was opened to lock up communists, anarchists and revolutionaries. The outspoken Neruda, a Communist party politician, went into hiding and ultimately fled to Argentina. The film revolves around Neruda’s flight and the pursuit of him by a police inspector and the odd relationship that develops between the pair.

With wonderful cinematography, dynamic camera work and a gorgeous palette in beautiful settings that capture a wide range of the offerings that Chile possesses, the film surprisingly steered well away from Neruda’s politics. Lightly touching upon the situation, just enough to paint the scene, the effort was concentrated on the role of individual voice upon the spirit of an age and the resonance that it can achieve, when beautifully expressed, down the ages.   

Robert Conquest noted that lousy poetry was a good if not exact predictor of bad faith in politics. For Neruda, who could produce sentences such as:

My words rained over you, stroking you,
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
Until I even believe that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
Dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

To let his Stalinist politics infect his prose and produce frankly embarrassing lines on the death of Stalin, comparing him to “the noon” and the “maturity of man”, is like seeing sewage flowing out of a Bernini fountain. It is also perhaps an indication that the politics of the man is not nearly as serious or sincere as his art; that Neruda was more of an ideologue rather than an idealist.

This is not to indict Neruda alone – many of the cleverest and most educated intellectuals of the West became Communists because they felt that was “anti-fascist” or “anti-Nazism”. This false antithesis has been exposed by the likes of Orwell, Conquest and Hayek, who pointed out that these two political forces were more brothers than opposites, possibly best illustrated by the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, when Stalin and Hitler carved up Europe between themselves in what Victor Serge termed imperishably as “the midnight of the century”.

In arguing about this seismic event, Neruda had a heated argument with his friend Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet, politician and fellow Nobel recipient. Paz saw himself as a liberal left but who didn’t shy away from pointing out the totalitarian nature of the communist regimes, earning him the enmity of many leftists in Latin America. Stripped of his earlier utopian idealism, Paz nevertheless expresses very well the inextinguishable link between art, culture and politics:

There can be no society without poetry, but society can never be realized as poetry, it is never poetic. Sometimes the two terms seek to break apart. They cannot.

The recrudescence of extreme-left politics in the reincarnated forms facing the West today, despite the disillusionment of the USSR and the black-and-white contrasts of North vs South Korea, West vs East Germany, pre-1979 China to Capitalist China, and the collapsing sceneries in Venezuela, Cuba, and virtually all states run under the Communist model, is testament to the fact that the siren songs of utopianism is hard to resist, especially in intellectuals, who are good at self-deception. Without forgetting the benefits of Fabianism and social democracy, or Marx’s incisive and prescient critiques of capitalism, socialism as a means to organise society, as the lauded economist Thomas Sowell puts it, “has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”

Indeed Neruda later came to realise this point, when he wrote in his memoirs that "I had contributed my share to the personality cult, […] in those days, Stalin seemed to us the conqueror who had crushed Hitler’s armies."

The film captures some of the inconsistencies by portraying Neruda (played with slightly exaggerated energy by Luis Gnecco) as a temperamental, Dionysian, sybaritic artiste, who, despite his professed communism, is not one to shy away from the rich offerings of the bourgeoisie and who is much more in his element with artists, politicians, whores and the well to do than the working class and the rural elements. But his ability to inspire is shown through a scene where a simple gesture, whether meaning to or not, gave a down-trodden, mendicant and scorned drag-queen at a brothel he was hiding in the self-respect to puff up his chest in front of the police with the dignity of a prima donna. It’s perhaps a case of a reputation imbuing noble meaning into actions that didn’t have noble intent, but it also highlights the power of the word. As Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his essay In Defence of Poetry:

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

One feels the phrase “the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire” to be particularly pertinent to Neruda’s kind of ideological socialism compared to someone like Orwell, to whom no one who has read his wonderful Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London can throw the accusation of elitism.

Gael Garcia Bernal plays Oscar Peluchoneau, the narrator of the film and a police officer with an inferiority complex sent to capture the illusive Neruda. Increasingly haunted by his prey’s enormous reputation and his own insignificance in contrast, the fedora-wearing and moustache-grooming Peluchoneau makes a good device for the story to reflect the power of narrative. Both men wishes fame, one as a revolutionary, the other for catching a revolutionary. But both also in a sense require the other, building up to the breath-taking final segment in the snowy Andes where the two men finally come face to face.

Evoking Hitchcock, in turn fanciful (the opening scene takes place at a lavish men’s room where politicians in tuxedos debate and urinate simultanerously) and profound, humorous and sweeping, the film is shot with panache and verve. Though not a bio-pic by any means, Neruda captures a spirit of a man, eloquent, rebellious and beloved, whose presence infused hope and energy into generations of people in troubled times.

W.H. Auden wrote wonderfully in In Memory of W.B. Yeats, of the strange habit of Time, which ‘Worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives / Pardons cowardice, conceit / Lays its honours at their feet. This is certainly true of Neruda, but only because he wrote so well.

Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or bitterest hour of your life.

-       Pablo Neruda