Simon Mesa Soto’s Un Poeta (A Poet) is an intense character study of Oscar Restrepo, a poet who believes he never got his due in life. He is despondent and in decline, craving the elusive public recognition that he thinks he deserves and intent on not settling for anything less. Age is not in his favour and the marriage too has collapsed under strain. On paper, Oscar might feel like a cliched portrayal of a bitter, failed, frustrated artiste—alcoholic, misanthropic, egotist, responsible for his own fate as much as being guided by the vagaries of destiny itself and living in the past than working towards the future—but it’s the way the character has been written and performed and the progression of the plot itself that makes him deeply humane despite his flaws, so much so that you can’t help not sympathising with him. Colombian director Soto won the Palme d’Or in 2014 for his short film Leidi. His debut feature, Amparo, featured in the Critics’ Week in 2021. This Colombia-Germany-Sweden co-production is his second feature that fetched him the jury prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the recently concluded Cannes Film Festival.
Soto pushes in some amusing moments. Like the mention of The Alchemist leading onto an intellectual argument about Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paulo Coelho or how Oscar’s mother keeps telling him to not take her car. But he still does. There is the universally appealing philosophical discussion on poetry itself, about having the sensitivity to discover poetry in unusual places and trying to seek poetry in everything, even the most banal words. But the most compelling is the portrayal of Oscar’s self-pride. I am a poet, he retorts at the offer of a new job, declining it for writing a book instead. But then where is the money in books? This fundamental query sits at the heart of poetic darkness so to speak. The standout aspect is how the screenplay moves on the father-daughter relationship dynamic. Oscar has been estranged from his wife and daughter Daniella, offers to help her with college education but only to borrow five bucks from her, in turn. A young, underprivileged teenager, Yurlady, fills two major gaps in his life. At one level she is a proxy daughter figure. At another, her talent in penning verses is reminiscent of his own early glory days. She is an unexpected ally. It brings joy and sunshine to his bleak existence as he seeks self-fulfilment in her success. Mentoring her gives him a sense of purpose. But in being her guide to the world of poetry he also takes her to zones and spaces she is not meant to venture into, at her age.
Soto never lets the narrative slip into sentimentality. It’s the naturalism that he brings to the screen that’s a winner, be it in the writing, the production design or the sound and images. Ubeimar Rios as Oscar communicates the vulnerability behind the cussedness brilliantly. Incredible then to know that he is not a professional actor but a high school philosophy teacher, who organises a poetry festival and has a hard-rock band. Rebeca Andrade is as persuasive as the innocent yet precocious Yurlady. Juan Sarmiento Grisales’ camera frames the characters in telling, tight closeups, moving limpidly from one face to the other and also in giving the viewers a ringside view of the world of poetry in the Colombian city of Medellin. Ultimately, Un Poeta is a universal treatise on the world of arts and letters, in that it’s about the contradictions inherent in creativity in general in any corner of the world—the economic strife that runs parallel to artistic achievements. One may or may not quite lead to the other.