On Location: Chile

It is often said that an overarching sense of anxiety or dread permeates the work of famed writer Joan Didion. For instance, her memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005) is haunted by the reader’s knowledge of the death of her daughter, which occurred just before its publication. In a similar fashion, “Neruda” (2016) makes viewers with a knowledge of history squirm in their seats not because of the cat-and-mouse drama that unfolds in the film itself, but because of the subtle moments of political atmospheric buildup to the eventual dictatorship of Chilean fascist Augusto Pinochet injected into the film, directed by Pablo Larrain.

It may seem strange to call a political film such as “Neruda” subtle. Set in 1948 after President Gabriel Gonzalez Videla outlawed the Communist Party in Chile, it follows Senator and Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) on the run, pursued by delusional fascist policeman Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael Garcia Bernal). However, it is the political developments glimpsed on the periphery of the main narrative — the forced relocation of laborers to camps, the imposition of censorship, the early construction of the network of informants and the police state — that ultimately have the most impact. By the end of Neruda’s irreverent, twisting, turning chase, the audience has seen the building blocks of Pinochet’s fascist state take shape.

The political message of “Neruda” departs from the man himself, who seems more concerned with questions of art, artifice, collective consciousness and memory, though director Larrain is careful to note their frequent intersections. As Neruda evades Peluchonneau up and down Chile’s slender sliver of territory, leaving taunting clues and taking care not to disappear completely and ruin the fun, he increasingly encounters conflicts between his politics, his writing and his own life. The undulating, melodic poetry and politics of Neruda the legend start to seem incongruous with the personal realities of Neruda the fugitive.

Neruda’s relationship with Peluchonneau raises questions about the relationship between history and fiction. Peluchonneau, reading the various clues left by Neruda, is well aware that he is being played like a fiddle. However, he cannot escape the narrative crafted for him by Neruda, creating a conflict between his independent conception of himself and his status as a character in Neruda’s story. Eventually, Peluchonneau begins to lose sight of what distinguishes Neruda from just another character in a fictional story. By the time he finally confronts Neruda, he begins to doubt whether that distinction matters at all.

Conflict is always multilayered in “Neruda.” In dealing with the inner workings of the mind of a genius up against political reality, Larrain contrasts life and history, two entities that are never one and the same. As politics develop and regimes shift, exactly where the people who influence such shifts fit in with their grand ideas and ambitions is the hardest question Larrain seeks to answer. By the time Neruda finally leaves Chile, history seems to be strictly the domain of legends, inaccessible to men.