“Neruda”, the new Golden Globe-nominated movie about the Chilean Poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda, is a semi-fictional account of the renowned poet’s life in 1948 when he fled Chile after accusing the government of the Communist Party.
The film, which is semi-fictional, is directed by acclaimed Chilean director Pablo Larrain and stars Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal as fictional police inspector Oscar Peluchonneau, who is assigned to track Neruda down after his escape from Chile.
Larrain, known for his Oscar-nominated “No” and award season favorite, Jackie, explained the premise of the film.
“The film in a way shows two specific years in the life of Neruda, how he escapes from Chile and when he finally makes it to Paris and all of that is taken from a point of view of a character that is very fictional, that’s the character played by Gael,” said Larrain.
“It’s a film profoundly poetic and about his poetry and how he combined literature with politics. That was created through a mechanism that I believe it’s a product of a literary and poetic activity,” added Larrain.
Garcia Bernal, who worked with Larrain on “No,” said the movie opened up a world of poetry to him.
“This film made me discover poetry, and I think all of us who were involved, it gave us a new perspective, a new lecture of what we can do with poetry. Beyond the experience and the outcome of a fantastic film and the fraternity that we created, what I really keep from this is how close I became with poetry,” he said.
Garcia Bernal, an independent cinema darling, who rose to fame in 2000 after appearing in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Amores Perros, said working on smaller films allowed him to make films he wanted to make.
“These films give me everything, it gives me the opportunity to make movies that I want, it gives me freedom. I really don’t see them as foreign films, to me these are film that come from where I come, so, whether it’s Chile, Mexico or any part of Latin America, I feel they are a product of a place where I was born,” said Garcia Bernal, who is also nominated at the 74th Golden Globes for his performance in Amazon’s “Mozart in the Jungle” series, the same show for which he won the Golden Globe earlier this year.
As for what Garcia Bernal learned from the Nobel winning poet Pablo Neruda, the Mexican actor said, “the dimension of poets, the fact that a poet as enormous as him could live so many lives within one life.”
Neruda is set for limited release in Los Angeles and New York on Friday (December 16) and goes on wider release in January 2017.
The 74th Annual Golden Globe Awards will air in NBC on January 8, 2017.
