Whether or not you know that its leading man
died the day after the picture finished shooting,
The Postman is an unusually affecting film
about the relationship between an exiled poet and
the postman who keeps him in contact with his past
life.
It's an art-house tear-jerker of the first
rank, very loosely based on the life of the
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who was unwelcome in
his native country and lived on Capri in the early
1950s. The Italian-language script is also drawn
from Antonio Skarmeta's novel, "Burning Patience,"
which imagined a wider age gap between Neruda and
his devoted postman, Mario, a fisherman's son who
has little interest in the family business.
In retrospect, the book's teenage Mario makes
more conventional dramatic sense than the
middle-aged, gaunt Mario in the movie. Supposed to
be in his early 30s, he looks considerably older.
But the late Neapolitan comic Massimo Troisi made
the role his own, playing Mario as an aging
innocent, a late bloomer whose life is irrevocably
altered by this friendship. His age is one of the
things that make the movie special. So is his
frailty, which lends a quiet urgency to Mario's
long-delayed coming-of-age.
Philippe
Noiret, the French actor who played a
similar nurturing role in another popular Italian
movie, Cinema Paradiso, plays Neruda as a
distracted, self-absorbed artist who gradually
grows fond of the fan who delivers his mail. As
before, his voice is dubbed, but this is handled
with minimal awkwardness.
For a while, there's a
Cyrano-like quality to
their story, especially when Mario borrows one of
Pablo's poems to impress a waitress named Beatrice
(Maria Grazia Cucinotta). But when Pablo
criticizes him, Mario declares that "poetry
belongs not to those who write it but to those who
need it." Pablo is not only impressed; he becomes
an accomplice in Mario's pursuit. Before long,
Mario is writing his own love poetry.
Ultimately the friendship must end when Pablo
is called back to his home, and there's an
extended epilogue that goes a long way toward
deflating the potential sentimentality of the
tale. Indeed, there's a fundamental bleakness in
its assumptions about the equality of artists and
their fans.
The film's British director, Michael
Radford,
got his start in documentaries and has directed
only a few features. The best-known remain his
grimly effective treatment of George Orwell's
1984 and his enjoyably trashy 1987 murder
mystery, White Mischief, both starring John
Hurt.
He could not have strayed much further from
that background than he does here, yet there's no
sense of strain, of a filmmaker who doesn't
understand a foreign culture or language (The
Postman has been a huge popular success in
Italy).
There's a warmth and intimacy here that
Radford's earlier films never approached. Troisi's
heartfelt performance has much to do with that.
Filming the book was his idea, he was deeply
committed to it, and he literally died trying to
get it on the screen.
From
Fcourt
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