443 - Il Postino, Italy, 1994. Dir. Michael Radford, Massimo Troisi.
The Postman.
"Words are the worst things ever."
Donna Russo is talking to her daughter Beatrice. She warns her.
"When a man starts to touch you with his words, he's not far off with his hands."
Donna Russo has found Beatrice sitting on her bed. Staring out the window. She smells trouble.
"I'm thinking."
"With the window open?"
"Yes. With the window open."
Uh oh.
"Be honest with me. What did he tell you?"
"Metaphors."
"Metaphors? Never heard such big words from you before. What metaphors did he do to you?"
It may be too late. Mario Ruoppolo, the postman, has already done several metaphors to Beatrice.
And Beatrice seems to like having metaphors done to her.
From the moment he first saw her, she became his Beatrice. Naturally. But he has never heard of Beatrice. And for that matter, he has never heard of Dante.
No worries. Pablo Neruda is here to teach him.
Pablo Neruda?
Yes.
The great Chilean poet is here. In the flesh. On the island. In Italy. An exile from home. A quiet guest in the Mediterranean community. A community composed of people who do not read poetry.
But Mario has come to read poetry. And apparently, according to Beatrice, he has come to write poetry. And to do metaphors to her.
He has been bringing Neruda his mail each day, and the two have formed a friendship. Mario is curious. Inquisitive. He asks Neruda to explain things. And Neruda is generous with him. And helps him. He gives him the gift of a writing book in which to write his thoughts. He teaches him to do metaphors.
Mario first met Beatrice in the cafe in which she works, where she was killing time playing foosball. Which she calls pinball. He joined her. They never spoke a word. He rarely saw the table. He looked at her. She beat him.
At one point she placed the white ball in her mouth.
He took it home with him. He showed Neruda. This is important. She touched it.
At first Mario asks Neruda to write poetry to her for him. To be his Cyrano de Bergerac. And Pablo, in a moment of unthinking, tries. But he grows frustrated. I cannot write about her. I do not know her. I cannot write your feelings for you. I do not have those feelings. You must write.
So he teaches Mario how to do it.
One night Mario is looking up at the moon. And he holds the white foosball up next to it. And there it is. The key to unlocking metaphors. Now he can do them.
You're smile spreads across your face like a butterfly.
Your laugh is a rose, a spear unearthed, crashing water. Your laugh is a sudden silvery wave.
Like being on the shores of the white ocean.
Donna Russo is worried.
"Then what did he do to you?"
"I kept quiet."
"And he?"
"He kept quiet too. Then he stopped looking at my eyes and began looking at my hair. Without a word. As if he were thinking."
Uh oh.
It is not good for a man to be thinking. Especially when looking at a woman's hair.
Donna Russo presses her point.
"One stroke of his finger and you're on your back."
"You're wrong. He's a decent person."
"When it comes to bed, there's no difference between a poet, a priest, or even a communist!"
We have spent at least an hour with Mario. So we agree with Beatrice that he is a decent person. He has won us over with his quiet simplicity. His gentle sincerity. And we know that he loves her. He is not driven by his body but by his heart.
But then, well, the heart and the body do often end up together do they not?
Naked
You are as simple as one of your hands--
smooth, terrestrial, tiny,
round, transparent.
You have moon-lines, apple-paths.
Naked
You are as thin as bare wheat.
Naked
You are blue like a Cuban night.
There are vines and stars in your hair.
Naked
You are enormous and yellow
Like summer in a gilded church.
And these are the words of the amateur. But then amateur does mean one who does it for love.
(If you write a poem to a woman in which you state, "You are enormous," let me know how she takes it. I am curious. (Yellow.))
Beatrice hides the words in her bosom. Her mother reaches in and grabs the paper. She takes it to church. Takes it to the priest. Shows him. Asks him to read it to her. She is illiterate.
He takes his time. He looks unexcited about telling her. She makes him.
"Well?"
"It's a poem."
"Read it to me!"
She asks for it.
He reads. "Naked."
She exclaims. "Madonna!"
When Pablo Neruda first arrived on the island, Mario was excited. He got the job delivering the mail, because he had a bicycle. An homage, it seems, to Bicycle Thieves (1948).
He took a book with him to have it autographed. He asked Neruda to sign it to him. "To Mario." He had good reason. He wanted the souvenir.
"I'll go to Naples and show all the girls that I met Pablo Neruda, the poet of love."
Already he knew. He may not have known poetry, but he understood the prestige of the poet. And felt the rumblings in his own heart.
But they were strangers then, and Neruda just signed his name.
But daily excursions have paid off. By now they are friends, and eventually the master turns to the apprentice and asks him for help.
Pablo asks Mario for a word for the nets. The fishing nets. After all, Mario would know more than he.
Mario tells him sad. The sad nets.
Pablo writes it down. Now Mario has contributed to the bard's immortal words.
Il Postino is a film with three themes. Love, poetry, and politics. Pablo Neruda teaches Mario how to express his love. He shows him how to write poetry. And he also influences his politics.
Early on he tells him that when he was once a senator in Chile he visited a region called Pampo. A place where it rains once every fifty years. Where life is unimaginably hard. He wanted to meet the people who had voted for him. A man came up from the coal mine "with a mask of coal dust and sweat on his face," and he beseeched him. "Wherever you go, speak of this torment. Speak of your brother who lives underground in hell."
And Pablo tells Mario that he chose that day to write something to help the man in his struggle. "To write the poetry of the mistreated." That is how Canto General came about.
And yet, in his Utopian naivete Neruda has become a communist. And he encourages Mario to become a communist. A system that has brought oppression wherever it has been applied. Responsible for more mass murders than any other system on earth. Tyranny. Totalitarianism. Coercion. Cruelty. Torture. Terror. Genocide.
For Neruda it is theory and emotion. An abstract ideal claiming to help the working man. We would like to think, to hope, that this amiable and benevolent poet would not really support what communism really is. We know more about him in real life, but I am referring to the fictional Pablo Neruda as presented within the film.
But aside from the political thrust of the movie, the love story is simple, sweet, and heartfelt. And any celebration of poetry is always welcome. Especially if it motivates the viewer to read the works of such a great poet.
During the film Neruda is waiting to hear from Sweden. From the Nobel committee. To find out if he has been selected to win the Nobel Prize. If this film is set in 1950, then he would finally win it twenty-one years later, in 1971 (and unfortunately be terminated a mere two years later by the ruthless Pinochet).
Phillippe Noiret, our beloved lawman from Coup de torchon (1981), our beloved projectionist from Cinema Paradiso (1988), has returned thirteen and six years later as Pablo Neruda. And he looks completely different. He has shaved his (beard and) mustache. He has gained weight. His face is filled out. He has more hair. He plays Neruda with courteous and charitable composure. He is a good actor.
Massimo Troisi plays Mario Ruoppolo. He himself is a screenwriter and director as well as an actor, and he wrote the screenplay for this film and is listed as a collaborating director. He acted in a dozen films and wrote and directed five of them. He was from Naples and a beloved man both there and throughout Italy.
The film was nominated for five Oscars--including Screenplay, Director, Actor (Troisi), and Picture (as opposed to Foreign Film). It won the Oscar for Best Music for Luis Bacalav's original dramatic score. The romantic melodic refrain stays in the mind and helped propel the film to worldwide success.
Maria Grazia Cocinotta plays Beatrice. She has appeared in many films and continues to work today. You may know her as a Bond girl alongside Pierce Brosnan in The World is Not Enough (1999).
Massimo Troisi gave his life to make this film. He had fallen in love with the novel, Burning Patience, on which it is based (which was in turned based on a movie of the same name), and he decided to make it despite health problems. He got his friend Michael Radford to direct. He was born with congenital heart problems. He delayed heart surgery to shoot the film. While shooting he fell ill and worked only one hour a day. He filmed many of his scenes sitting down. He filmed many in only one take. At age 41, one day after filming was completed, he died of a heart attack.
No comments:
Post a Comment