|
COMMIE SOUFFLÉ Michael Radford’s Il Postino is rather like a soufflé—a gentle concoction puffed up with justifiable adoration for the poet Pablo Neruda. After a dippy beginning, during which some of us are fighting hard to get past actor Massimo Troisi’s Italian (sounding like booze-slurred Arabic), the middle portion is satisfying: its frothy lightness is lyrical, an enchanting, reverberant poem. We derive from it something the few movies about poetry haven’t gotten to: says Troisi’s Mario, “Poetry doesn’t belong to those who write it, but to those who need it.” Have we ever heard the use of poetry expressed more succinctly? Playing Neruda, who is taken aback by Mario’s unexpected pithiness, Philippe Noiret responds with begrudging sufferance, “I appreciate that highly democratic sentiment.” Because the movie deals a stacked deck against Troisi, who, as his real-life death approaches, looks like an emaciated Tom Tryon, we’re a little too ready to accept, on Mario’s small island town, there’d be so earthy a mythic sensualist as Maria Grazia Cucinotta’s Beatrice to lift his spirits. She’s right out of a 50s Sophia Loren manifesto, only much prettier than Loren was back then. But if we can’t refuse the glorious Neruda metaphors used to seduce, how can we refuse Beatrice’s aunt asking “What metaphors did he do to you?” getting the movie’s best laugh? The screenplay, written by Radford, Troisi, Anna Pavignano, Furio Scarpelli and Giacomo Scarpelli, has given the actor a screen death avoiding his heart condition by allowing a politically sacrificial connection to volatility and subsequent violence sparked by ten million Italians voting Communist, another link to Neruda, who in fact suffered a fatal flirtation with Chilean Marxism when Salvador Allende won a plurality election back in 1970. (Two weeks after Pinchot’s coup in September, 1973, the poet died on September 23, the cause of death still hotly disputed after several autopsies.) Serving as device to facilitate Troisi’s fate, which occurred very shortly after filming was completed, this question: given the difficulty in balancing the character and real life to affirm dignity to a deathwatch, would the movie have had much attention had it not been for his heroic struggle to stay alive? Neruda, whose poems established him first a symbolist, then surrealist, finally a realist, claimed not to understand how it came to be his celebrated book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, filled with heartache, took its readers to such levels of bliss. Excepting the defating politics, Il Postino comes close to explaining why. Text COPYRIGHT © 1998 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
|