Daily from Friday April 14th until Thursday April 20th

[but only in late evening performances]

The film is set in 1948 as the famous Chilean poet and Communist Party Member [Partido Comunista de Chile] Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) goes into hiding and exile when the Party is outlawed. The subject is immediately interesting and the film’s director, Pablo Larrain, has already achieved an enviable reputation for his earlier films.

His last film, Jackie (2016) was both highly praised and relatively  successful. The earlier Tony Manero (2008) and then The Club (2015) were stylish exercises that used noir techniques to offer stories that commented obliquely on Chile’s fractured past. Both the latter films enjoyed the talented cinematography of Sergio Armstrong. He is back on Neruda and the film also offers the acting skills of Gael Garcia Bernal.

My reservations are that I am not certain that Larrain will deal effectively with the politics of the work of the great revolutionary poet. Tony Manero and The Club were effective partly because they used less obviously political stories as metaphors. In Jackie, dealing directly with the Kennedy legend, its myths were uncritically revisited. And Larrain’s other film, No (2012) dealing with the 1988 Referendum on the Junta in Chile, presented a one-sided view of the organised working class in that country, effectively ignoring the Socialist Party of Chile [Partido Socialista de Chile].

It will be interesting to compare the portrait of the great poet with that in Michael Radford’s Il Postino: The Postman (1994 with Pilippe Noiret). Even if the film fails to do justice to Neruda’s politics it is most likely to be an absorbing and well produced film.