An open thread review of current political movies!

As you can see, I've changed the Open Thread a bit. I've decided to focus on movies with overtly political themes. I'm going to mostly focus on current movies, but when there are none, I'm going to dig around in Netflix and Amazon Prime to see if I can find some great old political movie that I can share (I think I remember Ed Murrow did a special on immigrant farm labor I'd love to find).

I'll be giving y'all a review, and rating the movies on a scale of 1 to 5 Savios.

A no-Savio movie is working for the machine: destructive to truth, human rights, or continued life on this planet. A five-Savio movie is indispensable to anyone fighting the machine.
If anybody has a movie they want me to bring to the attention of the community, please send me a private message and I'll review it.

This week I saw Neruda, which I thought would be a biopic about Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

I'd read a little Neruda in my twenties, and liked his poetry immensely. But I had never taken a class on him, nor written an article, so I approached the movie in near-ignorance. I knew he was Chilean. I knew from experience that he was a great poet (here's a taste of his poetry):

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.

You can see why he'd remain in memory after even a glancing acquaintance with his work.

I also knew from hearsay that he was a prominent Chilean Communist, which is why I went to see the movie. I've had an interest in Chile since I chose it for a class project in my Spanish III class in high school. We were supposed to pick a country to study--an innocent enough assignment--and I happened to choose Chile, which led to my discovering the horrors of its then-recent coup by Augustin Pinochet, one of the worst people the human race has yet produced. This project led to my becoming involved in activism against Reagan-era US policies regarding Latin America, including our wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. So in a strange way, my encounter with the history of Chile at a young age led to my becoming an activist.

The director, Pablo Larrain, calls the movie an anti-biopic, so I didn't get informed in quite the way I expected when I walked in. Neruda begins in 1948, when Senator Pablo Neruda has to go into hiding because the President of Chile has outlawed the Communist Party, and ends when Neruda reaches the safety of Paris. The movie does not go into why Neruda became a Marxist (I found out later that, like many of his generation, he was powerfully affected by the rise of fascism in Spain, in particular because the fascists in Spain murdered his friend, the great poet Garcia Lorca.)

You will ask why does his poetry no longer speak
Of dreams and leaves
And the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets
Come and see the blood
In the streets.

Larrain focuses solely on the portion of Neruda's life when he was running from the Chilean government, and turns that story into a piece of detective fiction which looks much like the classic film noir movies with Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. The character on the movie poster is not even Neruda, but the police inspector chasing him, Óscar Peluchonneau. Peluchonneau is an invention of Larrain and his screenwriter, Guillermo Calderon; he didn't exist in history. He is the working-class son of a prostitute who doesn't know his father, but imagines him to be a Chilean police chief who was one of his mother's many customers, and thus is an interesting microcosm of working-class resentment, honest appraisal of the conditions he grew up in, and a desire to succeed within the system, to be recognized.

But this transformation of life into detective fiction isn't only happening at the level of movie production; Larrain and Calderon make the character of Neruda aware of fictionalizing his own life. "I like police novels. They distract me from the fact that I'm being pursued by the police," he says wryly, both drawing a comparison and a contrast between his life and the novels. He leaves copies of his police novels for Peluchonneau to find, like a director would leave a script for one of his actors so he can learn his lines. Indeed, when the detective finally meets Neruda's wife, Delia, she informs him that he is a fictional character created by Neruda, a supporting character to Neruda's own, the tragic policeman chasing the depraved fugitive. Neruda's escape would not be sufficiently dramatic without a pursuer.

This is why the movie really is an anti-biopic: not simply because it lacks a comprehensive cradle-to-grave narrative, but because it examines the notion of what the Great Man really is--a fiction, in this case one created consciously, for reasons both personal and political. It's not new to declare a Great Man to be a fiction. Many movies and books, much commentary and criticism, has made this point about various Great Men, usually right before the authors, artists, or critics step in it. It's easy to pop the bubble of the Great Man myth. What counts is what you do afterward. Once you have denied that the Great Man is a biographical truth, the easiest thing in the world is to declare, one way or another, that he is a lie. What follows is usually a period of purposeless iconoclasm, in which the writer or filmmaker smashes everything in sight and generally ends up blaming somebody for the fiction existing in the first place--either the Great Man himself, his backers, or the people for being so stupid as to believe in it. There's also considerable unacknowledged self-aggrandizing pleasure involved in puncturing the bubble of the Great Man fiction, which I think comes from pride in not being stupid enough to have been inspired, enabling the author or artist to elevate himself over the masses by way of cynicism. Too much of this kind of thing, and you end up with art, or with a political movement, whose sole pleasure comes from destroying inspiration and sneering at ordinary people.

Larrain and Calderon avoid this trap in two ways. First is their even-handed treatment of Neruda the character. I don't know how accurate to life their depiction of Neruda is, but I do know that they approach their Neruda, the fictional character, with consummate fairness. Luis Gnecco is a hell of an actor, because he demonstrates Neruda's flaws-- his considerable ego, the shitty way he sometimes treats his wife, and his disregard for the simple precautions that should be taken if one is a fugitive on the run (this is the part that would have led me to tell Neruda, as portrayed in the movie, to take a long walk off a short pier). At the same time Gnecco portrays Neruda's unshakeable, genuine commitment to socialism and the profound recognition of other human beings as equals which was its wellspring. It shines like a clear light among all his flaws, and intertwines with his aim of fictionalizing himself into a romantic figure, which he does, in part (but only in part), to further the cause of socialism and help the Chilean people.

There are three interactions Neruda has in the film which show that commitment: one with a drag queen, one with a girl of about ten in the streets of Valparaiso, and one with an angry woman at a Communist Party meeting. The drag queen, when questioned at police headquarters about her friendship with Neruda, makes a speech I wish I could reproduce here, but I couldn't find it online. She tells the story of how Neruda treated her with respect as an artist, telling her she was as much an artist as he was, asking her what she sang, and how she felt when she sang. "Respeto humano," she says, remembering their time together, her hands shaking with fear as she lights a cigarette, no doubt considering what the police might do to a homosexual friend of a fugitive Communist.

The scene where Neruda, walking in Valparaiso, is followed by a beggar girl, reminded me so powerfully of Bernie Sanders that I was shocked. Neruda, about to go in disguise on a Chinese merchantman, and thus escape the country, has had a new silk suit made for himself, so he can pose as a rich eccentric. Since he's not supposed to be out on the streets, but in hiding, he has no money. He has to tell the girl he has nothing to give her. And then he hugs her, because it's all he has to give. This is why I say Gnecci is an amazing actor: that hug is not saccharine, but absolutely genuine, and in his eyes you see the understanding that he can do little or nothing for the girl. Later, you find that he couldn't stand to do absolutely nothing, so he left her his newly-made silk coat.

The angry woman at the Communist party meeting challenges Neruda, and the Communist party itself, with some self-criticism it would have behooved Marxists everywhere to take to heart before everything went to hell. "I've been cleaning shit out of the bourgeois' toilets for years," she says. "I've been a Communist party member since I was 14. We get no protection. He gets protection." When the Party official says "He gets the protection of a Party leader," she says "I have a question for the leaders. When the revolution comes, we're all going to be equal. Does that mean we'll all be like me? Or all be like him?" Neruda answers "We'll all be like me. We'll eat in bed and fornicate in the kitchen if we want to." And you can see he means it. He's a hedonist who thinks everyone should be able to be a hedonist too. His egotism doesn't express itself in stratified hierarchies. He cares about fame and reputation, but doesn't give two shits about status.

I wish I could find the maid's speech online, too, because I'd love to quote it in full; after all her criticisms, she says "And you know what? I drink to that. Because we need our Communist Senator. We need our poet to write about the sorrows of the people." She says these words with a good deal of bitterness--to have one's sufferings be the source of moral repute and fame for one who isn't suffering them is a bitter thing--but she also means them. The people of Chile need Neruda because he makes them visible. One of the reasons the Great Man myth persists, seemingly ineradicable, is that the Great Man can bring things into the realm of the visible. It's one of the two things people seek from the Great Man: visibility and possibility, representation and inspiration.

None of these scenes obscures Neruda's faults, and none of them interferes with the point that he is fictionalizing himself into a larger-than-life figure. The overall effect is a portrayal of a complete human being. It's fashionable nowadays to portray characters that are "gray," both good and bad, but rarely is it done as well as this. And it's interesting that this deeply human portrayal exists in a movie about fictionalizing the self. Usually the idea of the self being fiction is the cue for detached, daredevil antics with the meanings of words, a kind of delight in destabilization for its own sake, as if the writer and director and actors were trapeze artists doing tricks in mid-air. In this case, you get a presentation of Neruda as a complex human being and the humanity of the character renders him accessible at the same time that you are aware that he's turning himself into a fiction.

What the movie appears to be saying is that fiction and authenticity don't preclude each other, that fiction occupies a different space than either truth or lies. If you enter the theater thinking that Neruda was a magnificent poet and a honest, dedicated socialist, you will leave the theater with those beliefs intact but you will also know him as flawed and human. And you might, simultaneously, understand that those beliefs are part of a story, and story exists between fact and fiction, truth and lies. Oddly, you end knowing that you don't know Pablo Neruda at the same time that you feel his humanity more keenly than ever before.

1/2

Inspired by Milton's Photography: Poetry by Pablo Neruda

THE NAMES

I didn't write them on the roofbeams because they
were famous, but because they were companions
Rojas Giménez, the nomad, nocturnal, pierced with
the grief of farewells, dead with joy pigeon breeder, madman
of the shadows
Joaquín Cifruntes, whose verses rolled like stones in
the river.
Fredrico, who made me laugh like no on else could
and who put us all in mourning for a century.
Paul Eluard, whose forget-me-not color eyes are as sky
blue as always and retain their blue strength under the earth.
Miguel Hernándes, whistling to me like a nightingale
from the trees on Princesa Street until they caged my
nightingale.
Nazim, noisy bard, brave gentleman, friend.
Why did they leave so soon? Their names will not slip
down from the rafters. Each one of them was a victory.
Together they were the sum of my light. Now, a small
anthology of my sorrow.