The life of the tortured artist: society doesn’t understand them, friends and family abandon them, their audience doesn’t appreciate their work. From the artist’s perspective, the torture originates from circumstances beyond their control; Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet posits the notion that the torture originates within the artist themselves. There’s a callous irreverence to the early jump cut out of the opening titles and into the action, the music suddenly silenced, that signals to the timbre of the rest of the movie, caustic and cheekily unforgiving. But this is, in fact, also a compassionate movie, even toward its tortured artist protagonist, one that endeavors to understand its every character’s nature and express it with authenticity, if also a little comic exaggeration.
But compassion and sympathy are not the same thing, and Mesa Soto’s understanding of chronically down-on-his luck unemployed poet Oscar (Ubeimar Rios) doesn’t quite equate to sympathy. A figure of promise and the recipient of some acclaim in his younger years, he’s now middle-aged, out of work, alcoholic, and still living in Medellín with his mother, whose coddling only exacerbates his many issues. Under pressure from his sister, Oscar accepts a job teaching part-time at a high school, just one more opportunity that he appears destined to squander (he starts his first lesson swigging liquor from a flask). But here he meets Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), a teenager with a remarkable talent for poetry, though little apparent intention of pursuing it with much enthusiasm. So he takes it upon himself to mentor and champion her, enrolling her in a poetry class at an arts academy and encouraging her to compete at a local poetry festival. If success has passed him by directly, maybe it can meet him vicariously.
If A Poet offers, overall, a somewhat familiar perspective on the tortured artist trope, the honesty and accuracy of the details in Mesa Soto’s script enliven it. Surprise may be largely absent, but nuance is not. Mesa Soto is savvy to the particularities of interactions between various people in various scenarios, such that every scene feels vibrant and genuine. Minor characters are drawn with equal clarity and subtlety, and even the briefest of performances feel as rich and finely tuned as Rios’, whose inexperience (this is his first credited role) is certainly no barrier to expressiveness. He captures the indignity of Oscar’s many humiliations with sensitivity and, where called for, intensity, turning a potential caricature into a believable figure, a man who has, perhaps, just made a caricature of himself. When the origins of his torture eventually begin to originate from beyond his control, you feel for him, as pathetic as he is.
Between Oscar and Yurlady, an intriguing dynamic develops, and A Poet’s central thesis emerges. He’s a man of great ambition and even greater self-belief; she’s a girl of modest ambition, preferring to become a nail technician over Colombia’s new pre-eminent poet. At the tail end of his promise, he resists the circumstances into which he’s either been forced or forced himself, generally refusing to recognize their value until too late; at the budding end of her promise, she resignedly submits to such circumstances, yet never lets them change her perception of herself nor who she wants to be. His talent (if he even has much — it’s derided several times by his more accomplished peers and acquaintances) has become a burden; hers only becomes one through the determination of a failed artist to erase his failure through her success. He seeks belonging in a milieu that holds no place for him; she finds it in a milieu that does. Mesa Soto argues that pursuing one’s desires demands a truthful, realistic appreciation of who oneself actually is. Anything else is delusion, and, for his delusions, Oscar only has himself to blame.
A Poet isn’t quite a hopeless movie, however, and not just for the notes of droll, abrasive humor that Mesa Soto sources from his material throughout. The changes Oscar must make to his external situation inevitably inform changes to his internal situation, engendering a level of introspection that those around him mostly distrust due to its atypicality. He finds value in living his life through someone else’s journey; then, when that journey doesn’t follow his planned path, he must find value in living his life for himself. A Poet is much too committed to realism to close its chronicle of misfortune with some triumphant, Hollywood happy ending, but, even if Oscar remains as tortured as ever before, it at least promises the hope of an end to his tortures. For that, he’d only need acknowledge their origin, and seek a sense of belonging within himself.
DIRECTOR: Simón Mesa Soto; CAST: Ubeimar Rios, Rebeca Andrade, Guillermo Cardona, Alisson Correa; DISTRIBUTOR: 1-2 Special; IN THEATERS: January 30; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 3 min.
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