Hiding and searching, evasion and pursuit, inducement and self-realization, the wonderful wrestling between poets and spies, intertwined and advanced with beautiful sentences like poetry, the film "Chasing Neruda" (Neruda)" is not a biopic in the general cognitive sense. It is more like the interpretation and remodeling of the film's protagonist, the famous Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, by the film's creator.
The creators seem to want to use the period of Neruda's persecution, displacement, and escape from January 1948 to March 1949 to trace some of his trajectories, which have actual footprints. , there is a confusing mentality, and others use the chewing and dissolving of the text to get closer to the poet's tracking behavior in terms of geographical and psychological distance, and the hunter in the film has already incarnated into it. The form of constant pursuit is used to describe the representative of the poet's character, and through this process, the self-analysis is completed.
The poet who leaves the comfort of his home and his familiar friends, and deals with his pursuers, is as he wrote in his poem "Twenty Love Poems and Songs of Despair" - "When the splendid leaves fall, the veins of life are revealed. It can be found.” In order to avoid being hunted down, the poet, who was unable to go abroad and was living in various places in Chile at that time, kept encountering various people, as if this sudden exile brought him closer to the people at the bottom. In the course of brief exchanges or hurried passing, his various characteristics appeared one by one, and the advantages and disadvantages were brought into the eyes of the audience, such as his outstanding talent, brilliance, wit and humor, and his greed for pleasure, vanity, selfishness, and daring. It seems that through these humanized deconstructions, the audience can see or perceive the poet's veins, and then still be impressed by the charm of his literature and art, admire his poetic quality, thus reaffirming that this suffering world needs keenness and talent. the poet!
In order to reproduce some of the qualities of Neruda described in the film, Pablo Laraine, the director of films such as "Chile Says No", "The Priest Club", "The First Lady", etc. Laraine's shooting method has a strong sense of substitution, as if to lead the audience into the 15-month journey of Neruda, as if to revisit Neruda's poems and records. In the process, the audience seems to have made a bold and interesting experience - to experience the process of pursuit, step by step, and follow the poet's pace all the way. In the process, people re-acquainted with Neruda the ordinary man, the poet Neruda, and the fugitive Neruda. At the end of the film, the hunter has obtained a cognition like a blessing to the soul with his flesh and blood in the ice and snow. At this time, the fusion of the spiritual world finally achieved by the "cat and mouse" is quite poetic and ideal.
The footage of the film is beautiful, the lighting is exquisite, the psychedelic scenes of the dark night city, and the psychological battle of crossing the snow-capped mountains are all presented with the rhythm of poetry. In the end, he escaped from the majestic Andes Mountains to Argentina, and he released the rhythm of the chase very well.
In terms of actors' performances, the performances of poets and pursuers are remarkable. Luis Nico, who starred in Pablo Larraine's "Chile Says No," in "The Hunt for Neruda," appropriately gives the poet Neruda's character traits , often giving the audience an illusion that no matter in the moment of poetry recitation or the moment of dealing with the pursuers, Luis Nico is not performing, he is Neruda himself, and all those rumored "talents in love" Neruda's various "failures" also seem to be innate.
Gael García Bernal plays the pursuer and policeman Oscar Belluccino, who is sharp and paranoid, arrogant and inferior, slightly neurotic, and has the taste of literary appreciation of literary youth. Bernal interprets this stubborn pursuer with all his personality. The inner drama is layered and full, making the characters three-dimensional and credible. The madness and entanglement of the pursuers seem to stem from the heavy pressure of chasing Neruda. , things are all from his own, and some even come from his imagination.
As for the character with a strong sense of existence, the creators said in the film that in the fifteen months of escape and pursuit led by the self-reckless Neruda, the pursuer was just a busy wandering around the protagonist. fictional character. And the inner drama of Bellucheno's realization that "I came from a blank page" is carried out under the background of a kind of metaphorical light, which has a mysterious taste.
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