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Stay Puft
07-02-2017, 02:47 AM
NERUDA
Dir. Pablo LarraÃ*n

http://i.imgur.com/YAZsZEX.jpg

IMDb page (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4698584)

Stay Puft
07-02-2017, 03:08 AM
I'm pretty much torn down the middle.

On paper, this sounds way more exciting than Pablo LarraÃ*n's other 2016 biopic. Neruda is a fictional metanarrative about a police officer chasing the famous poet, less actual biopic and more phantasmagoric noir. It explores the power of Neruda's writing, not the facts of his life. But the end result is largely frustrating, and in the end, I can only say I liked it marginally more than Jackie. And I'm not even sure if I like it all that much.

Stylistically, it's a little bizarre. No and Jackie both have visual strategies that I found clear, purposeful and compelling, but Neruda merely feels haphazard. At first, I liked how dialogue scenes would play out through random locations and jarring angles, but after a while, I got tired of it. There is so much coverage and cutting and that's just not a style I can fuck with that much. The cinematography is also all over the map, sometimes looking good, sometimes looking soft and washed out, sometimes being completely blown out. The handful of rear projection scenes are jarring. None of it adds up to anything compelling.

The female characters (there are basically two, and they only matter insofar as they are or were romantically involved with Neruda) are terrible, and this really hurts some of the "meta" scenes. One of the big revelatory scenes involves a conversation between Delia and Óscar, the detective chasing Neruda, in which Óscar finally learns he's a fiction of Neruda's imagination. But conversations about reality and fiction, who is a main character and who is a supporting character, are simplistic and dull, and doubly unsatisfying when it's a woman who says they're all supporting characters to Neruda's story, when the movie is clearly more interested in some of those supporting characters (fictional males) than others (women in general). Also, as playful and lighthearted as the movie can often be with these themes (and to be fair it is an entertaining film up to a point for this reason), a scene like Óscar insisting he is not a supporting character, followed by a cut to him riding in a sidecar, is more cute than clever. I guess what I'm saying is, I liked parts of it, but I never felt this all amounted to much of anything.

To put it another way: I know exactly what Neruda amounts to, because the movie ends with Óscar delivering one final voice over narration to explain the point of the whole movie. But all that really inspires is indifference.

Addendum: I am willing to accept, of course, that a lack of familiarity with Neruda's work hampers my ability to appreciate elements of this film, and may play a role in my indifference.