Pablo Larrain’s picture of the  larrikin poet, NERUDA, is as ambitious, ambiguous and audacious as his anti biopic, Jackie.

Man and myth, icon and hedonist, a champagne Marxist with the heart of a poet and a predilection for pulp, Larrain’s Neruda, personified in performance as a portly proletariat potentate by Luis Gnecco, is a delicious super imposed study of a popular hero, who’s hallowed legacy is harrowed by the blunt edge of a fallen halo.

Writer Guillermo Calderon and director Pablo Larrain have invented a world, just as Neruda invented his. The film is more a “Nerudian” film than it is a film about Neruda.

The film opens with a literal piss take, with Larrain depicting the Chilean Senate chamber as a urinal, political posturing not so much as chest beating as penis shaking, honourable members indeed!

When the Communist Party, who has no penchant for Pinochet, is outlawed, Senator Neruda becomes a fugitive, and his pursuit is the privilege of dogged detective, Oscar Peluchonneau, played with gauche gravitas by Gael Carcia Bernal, sporting a pencil thin moustache and wide brimmed fedora, in a portrayal plucked from the pages of one peso pulp. It’s a cat and rat contrivance, a creator’s construct of character of making the humdrum of political exile into something exciting, romanticising the stone dead reality of day to day hiding.

It is said that Neruda was blessed by the light of genius and inspired by the muse of passion. The same can be said of Larrain and his collaborators with this cinematically erudite examination of imagination, which is simultaneously iconographic and iconoclastic.