I don't think I've seen a movie use light to obfuscate interiors as brilliantly as in Pablo Larraín's Neruda, an odd almost-biopic, almost-detective thriller about the late career and exile of Nobel Prize winning writer Pablo Neruda. Cinematographer Sergio Armstrong makes entire rooms vanish with harsh lights, turning figures into opaque silhouettes, suggesting a world where nothing is socially transparent; even daylight can't blot out the corruption infecting the Chilean government. More than anything, Neruda is an astonishingly beautiful film, easily one of the most visually stunning I've seen all year. But the film doesn't know what to make of itself. The first third is a cat-and-mouse political thriller obsessed with shifting identities. The middle third is a biopic with occasional asides focusing on fictional detective Oscar Peluchoneau (Gael García Bernal), a police officer hired by the Chilean government to locate and humiliate Neruda internationally. The last third becomes a post-modern dalliance as it follows Neruda's flight out of Chile and Oscar's eventual revelation that he is nothing but one of Neruda's fictional characters. Even stranger, the film treats him as an incompetent idiot in the last third whereas he commanded a certain begrudged gravity in the first two-thirds. Neruda doesn't really work, but it isn't a complete failure either. I think a few wires just got crossed during production.
6/10
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