Neruda

[projekktor id=’26364′]

After releasing one biopic last week (Jackie), director Pablo Larraín’s latest film Neruda is hitting theatres. It premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and screened at both Telluride and TIFF in September. The film stars Gael García Bernal, Luis Gnecco, and Mercedes Morán.

Beloved poet Pablo Neruda (Gnecco) is also the most famous communist in post-WWII Chile. When the political tides shift, he is forced underground, with a tenacious police inspector (Bernal) hot on his trail. Meanwhile, in Europe, the legend of the poet hounded by the policeman grows, and artists led by Pablo Picasso clamor for Neruda’s freedom. Neruda, however, sees the struggle with his police inspector nemesis as an opportunity to reinvent himself. He cunningly plays with the inspector, leaving clues designed to make their game of cat-and-mouse ever more perilous. In this story of a persecuted poet and his obsessive adversary, Neruda recognizes his own heroic possibilities: a chance to become a symbol for liberty, as well as a literary legend.

Knowing that Pablo Neruda enjoyed crime stories, Larraín decided to make the film in a similar vein. “Neruda liked crime stories, which is why the film is ultimately a road movie with a police investigation element. These are genres which have evolving characters and, in the case of NERUDA, elements of farce and the absurd. No one winds up as he began… neither the hunter nor the prey.”

Neruda is rated 14A.