Quintessential small “prestige” picture. Italian-French-Belgian adaptation of a Chilean novel, set on a small Mediterranean island. Scored by an Argentinian (Luis Bacalov); directed by an Englishman (Michael Radford); co-starring a Frenchman (Philippe Noiret) as history’s most revered Chilean: Pablo Neruda.
Released in 1994. Released in the United States in 1995.
Nominated for five 1996 Oscars: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor (Massimo Troisi, who’d died), and Score (Bacalov won).
(Not unusual for Miramax thirty years ago.)
But the movie’s success is due to Troisi’s tricky performance.
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Troisi is Mario, the (fictitious) part-time postman to Neruda, who is in political exile. Mario and Neruda become friends. This is very much at Mario’s instigation. He intrudes at all hours, with or without mail.
Victor Hugo
remarked about his Channel Island years:
What a pity I was not exiled earlier! I could have achieved so many things which I fear I shall not have the time to complete.
Or as Simon Leys (ibid.) puts it:
The poet [Hugo] found himself left with only two interlocutors – but with these at least, he felt on the same footing: God and the ocean. … No wonder these years of solitude and contemplation were the most productive of his life.
Neruda seems determined to follow Hugo’s example. He devotes himself to beauty, politics, and his female companion. He is only pulled away from these things at the insistence of his tactless regular visitor.
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Roger Ebert:
The first time we see Mario … we think perhaps he is retarded. He is having a conversation with his father, who seems to be retarded, too, or perhaps just engrossed in his soup.
We realize in the next scene or two that Mario is of normal intelligence, but has been raised in a place that provided him with almost nothing to talk about.
I don’t think it’s the
place that makes Mario inarticulate. It’s that what
he seeks isn’t easily describable.
The island’s other postal worker (Renato Scarpa) has plenty to say.
He has political opinions. He admires Neruda as a famous fellow Communist. Of Neruda’s poetry, he knows almost nothing; he’s utterly mundane. Similarly, Mario’s father thinks only of fishing; and there’s an old widow, an innkeeper, who’s downright suspicious of whatever is purported to transcend daily concreteness.
Mario couldn’t care less about fishing. He doesn’t really care about politics, either. The island must import water; its provision is irregular; the authorities really ought to intervene. Mario understands this problem but shrugs it off.
Practicalities – earning a decent wage, having water to drink – have no grip on his imagination.
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What does?
Not the wider world.
Not whatever must be read about. Mario is more literate than most islanders but deciphers sentences haltingly. He’ll never devour pages of prose.
What, then?
If he knew the term, he might say:
Blessedness.
A kind of holiness or beauty. Saintly beauty, but not of deeds. Beauty of being.
And not just any beauty of being – not at first. There’s plenty of natural beauty all around Mario, but scenery leaves him unaffected.
No, it’s
supernatural beauty that he’s groping after, although it doesn’t occur to him to say as much, or even to try to formulate the concept. (His priest is useless.)
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The closest thing to Blessedness that Mario knows about – the most exalted thing he can imagine – is
Woman. Granted, he knows little of actual women. There are few on the island. His mother is long-dead.
Mario does go to the pictures. But this isn’t the story of a man’s love affair with the screen. There is another famous romance co-starring Philippe Noiret –
Cinema Paradiso – in which an older man initiates a younger into the practice of using art to reach out to what is longed for. Mario doesn’t seem much affected by screen beauties, however. Just as he’s indifferent to mountains and seas, he doesn’t pine after actresses. He’s after something more transcendent.
What Mario notices, sorting Neruda’s mail, is that women adore the poet. Not just
a woman.
Women. He badgers Neruda: first, for autographs that he might show to women; then, for advice on wooing.
You have to
talk to women, Neruda tells him. Neruda is deft with metaphor and rhythm. Mario takes note. Together they walk the hills and beaches, discussing the elements of figurative speech. Mario learns to attend to nature, and to use language to evoke feelings and happenings that have no names.
He listens to a recorded message from Neruda’s Chilean comrades. He acquires a sense of duty to his fellows.
He sees the world through his friend’s eyes.
Then Mario meets the prettiest girl on the island: the old innkeeper’s niece (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), fittingly named Beatrice. Here, at last, is Woman. Blessedness. He woos her with words. Some are Neruda’s; some are his own. This is the movie’s most conventional passage.
There is a wedding. Neruda signs the document as a witness. He wishes his friend well. Then, he returns to Chile.
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It’s at this point, in its last half-hour, that the movie reveals its ingenuity. Mario is drawn into politics, and into the daily running of the inn. He recites Neruda’s poetry while slicing onions and tomatoes. The mundane chores, more sensuous to him now that he has learned the language of poetry, recall Neruda to him.
He waits, in vain, to hear from his friend.
The story, hitherto so conventionally sweet, turns bitter.
This is an extraordinary development, and this is where Troisi’s anguished acting is extraordinary. Troisi, in fact, was near death. He put off a heart operation to make the movie and died one day after its completion.
There is a parallel with Mario’s story. The actor and the character both sacrifice themselves doing their respective labors of love.
This isn’t one of my favorite movies, but it has one of my favorite endings. It is very wise and very true. There is the friend who concerns himself with Great Causes, Great Sayings, and Great Deeds, who inadvertently or perhaps deliberately elevates those around him; and then there is the Great Friend, the one who loves his friend not for what he stands for or accomplishes but for who he is.
