By Rowland Bagnall

Il Postino (1994) tells the story of Pablo Neruda’s brief exile in Italy. The film is adapted from the novel Burning Patience (1985) by Antonio Skármeta, which fictionalizes Neruda’s 1952 stint on Capri, during which he occupied a villa owned by the Italian historian Edwin Cerio. Skármeta’s novel relocates the episode to Isla Negra, a village on the coast of Chile, fast-forwarding events to 1969 in order to encompass both the poet’s Nobel Prize (awarded in 1971) and death in 1973. The novel unfolds against a backdrop of political unrest; Neruda died just days after the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, a successful coup d’état led by General Pinochet. Il Postino, co-written by director Michael Radford and the film’s star, Massimo Troisi, restores the events of the story to Italy, exiling Neruda to another island in the Gulf of Naples. While the location isn’t specified, much of the film takes place on Procida, where Mario (Troisi), a simple, gentle man with a desire to outgrow his surroundings, lives with his aging father in a small fishing community.

The set-up of the film is straightforward enough. One night at the cinema, Mario sees a black-and-white newsreel of Neruda’s arrival in Rome, the voiceover explaining that the famous communist love poet has been unable to return to Chile on account of his political views. The footage soon turns to the island that Neruda is to stay on, at which point the audience bursts into applause, one man leaping to his feet when he sees himself up on the screen: “That’s me!” On his way home, Mario spots an advertisement for a job at the post office that requires a bicycle. Uninspired by his life as a fisherman, he bikes to an interview with the local postmaster-cum-telegrapher (Renato Scarpa) who promptly offers him the gig. Mario’s task will be to deliver mail to a single addressee, the celebrated poet, Pablo Neruda.

And so, Mario begins his daily commute, cycling uphill to Neruda’s temporary accommodation, mail tucked neatly in his knapsack. As we watch Mario, we hear Luis Enréquez Bacalov’s charming (later Academy Award-winning) score, a wistful, lightly melancholy arrangement that mirrors Mario’s plainspoken and deeply felt emotional intelligence. At first, the new postman is wary of Neruda, surprised to find that he appears so normal and Troisi’s range of subtle, quizzical expressions conveys child-like curiosity. Soon after they first meet, Mario orders a volume of Neruda’s poems, spending his free time studying them intently, as though trying to work the poet out, to understand how somebody so unassuming could have written poetry quite so profound.

The poems themselves are mostly lost on Mario, who hopes to ask Neruda to inscribe his book not so much for his admiration of the writing but to prove to the beautiful women of Naples that he is friends with a celebrity. Showing the postmaster Neruda’s signature—deflated to find that the inscription isn’t more personal and wondering if he can ask the poet to have another crack at it—Mario insists that he has not been bothering the writer, claiming he caught Neruda at a quiet moment, while the great man absentmindedly peeled a red onion. A supporter of Neruda’s politics, the postmaster is exasperated: “So, you think a poet can’t contemplate when he’s holding an onion?!”

With a comic premise that feels quaintly Shakespearean, the film establishes Neruda’s poetry as something of a love-potion, causing women to fall madly (even magically) in love with him. Mario soon enlists Neruda’s help to woo the sultry Beatrice Russo (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), a waitress at the local café. While Neruda refuses to write something himself—“I don’t even know her! A poet needs to know the object of his inspiration!”—he does help Mario to find the words for his affection, teaching him about the power of metaphor and visiting the café one afternoon to prove that he and Mario are friends. When he sees the beautiful Beatrice in person, Neruda reiterates that Mario doesn’t need his help at all: “You already have your poetry.” Wielding newfound respect and a rustic sense of metaphor, Mario writes a clumsy poem expressing his true feelings. (“It is better to say something you’re convinced of badly,” advises Neruda, “than something other people want you to say rather well.”) The poem seems to do the trick and Beatrice and Mario are married. Neruda acts as a witness and attends the wedding as their guest of honor. With a sense of comic resolution, the poet receives word at the banquet that his arrest warrant has been lifted, ending his period of exile and permitting his return to Chile.

On the surface, Il Postino rehearses some well-worn tropes; partly, it’s an inoffensively clichéd story about the power of poetry to express our innermost and hardest-to-articulate emotions, with Neruda teaching the simpleminded Mario a lesson about the poetry that’s all around him, if only he can find the words to say what’s truly in his heart. And yet, while these ideas facilitate the story and its comic trajectory, the film has something else to say about poetics, concerning poetry’s ability to capture and communicate reality.

At one point, Mario reads Neruda’s poem “Walking Around,” a dreamlike journey through an urban sprawl of warehouses and barbershops, “into hospitals where the bones fly out the window, / into shoeshops that smell like vinegar, / and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.” The poem expresses despair and exhaustion at the state of so-called society—drained of life, replete with “sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines / hanging over the doors of houses that I hate.” In the poem, Neruda conjures a Boschian hellscape, “umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.” When Mario plucks up the courage to ask Neruda what it means, the poet’s answer is deflective:

You see, Mario, I can’t tell you in words different from those I’ve used [in the poem]. When you explain it, poetry becomes banal. Better than any explanation is the experience of feelings that poetry can reveal to a nature open enough to understand it.

While Mario struggles with words and their interpretation, he possesess “a nature open enough to understand.” That phrase carries an echo of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of the poet, in his essay “Nature” (1836), as one “whose inward and outward sense are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.”

Shortly after this conversation, Mario delivers Neruda a peculiar package. The poet unboxes a clunky cassette, containing messages from Chile recorded by his friends and family. On Neruda’s desk sits a dictaphone that allows him to record a message of his own. After a brief introduction, Neruda passes the machine’s microphone to Mario, asking him to describe “one of the wonders of your island.” Flustered, Mario can only muster one thing: “Beatrice Russo.”

Unlike a Shakespearean comedy, Il Postino doesn’t end with marriage. Instead, it allows us to see how life continues once Neruda and his wife, Matilde, have gone. Elections loom large, with dubious promises to finally connect the island to a mainland water supply. All the while, Mario and the postmaster keep an eye on Neruda, hopeful that the poet will return, one day, to visit them. When Beatrice becomes pregnant, Mario immediately begins referring to their unborn baby as “Pablito.” At long last, a letter from Chile arrives (“the first letter I’ve ever received,” declares Mario, proudly). Alas, the letter isn’t from Neruda; instead it contains a formal request from the poet’s secretary to ship the Neruda’s last remaining things to South America.

In the final moments of the film, Neruda does return to Italy, arriving five years later at the café, much the same as it was, a photo from the wedding day up on the wall. A young boy, Pablito, stops Neruda in his tracks, moments before Beatrice enters. She is stunned to see the poet standing there before her. She explains that Mario has died, without having met his son—born a few days later. Indeed, we learn that Mario has been killed at a communist gathering in Naples, at which he was scheduled to recite a poem of his own—one dedicated to Neruda. The film presents black-and-white footage from the rally, showing the outbreak of police violence. We never get to hear the poem, Mario’s single sheet of paper trampled pitifully underfoot.

Rather than Mario’s poem, Beatrice offers Neruda something far more moving and profound, a message from Mario recorded on the dictaphone. Earlier in the film, we witness Mario returning to the dusty house to pack the poet’s things. Spotting the dictaphone, he sets about making a series of field recordings of the island: small waves, big waves, the wind on the cliffs; the sound of his father’s nets, hauled from the sea; the church bells and a “starry sky over the island”; the gentle heartbeat of Pablito, waiting to be born. “When you left here, I thought you’d taken all the beautiful things away with you,” Mario says into the dictaphone, “but now I realize that you left something behind for me.” In one sense, Mario’s recordings are proof that Neruda has taught him an invaluable lesson, to stop and see the beauty in the world around him. At the same time, the field-recordings speak to an important aspect of the film’s ideas about poetics, the poem’s capacity to preserve a trace of the real. Trace, “a mark or sign left by the passage of something,” reads the OED, one that indicates “a former presence,” deriving from the Old French, meaning “mark, imprint, [or] track.”

“[A] photograph is not only an image,” writes Susan Sontag, “it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.” In lieu of the poem that Mario was due to recite at the rally, the film instead gives us, and Neruda, a poem of a different kind; the field-recordings are the poem, capturing the essence of the island, “stenciled off the real.” They transcend both time and space, delivering Mario’s world into the future. I’m reminded of a comment by the American poet Jack Spicer, published in 1957. “I would like to make poems out of real objects,” he writes:

The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste—a real
lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in
my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud
that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images. The
imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make
a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.

Unlike Spicer’s imagined poem, Mario’s field-recordings make plenty of sound, “disclosing” the audible life of the island. Nevertheless, they clearly act out Spicer’s “pointing of a finger,” as we see Mario pointing the microphone directly at the various objects of his attention. Several shots in the sequence are framed from Mario’s point of view, his arm extending from behind the camera, thrusting the microphone into the scene. When he records Pablito’s heartbeat, the microphone is held so close that it is touching Beatrice’s body.

“If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you’ll see something of the difference between Homer’s poetry and anyone else’s,” suggests the British poet and classicist Alice Oswald. “There seem to be real leaves still alive in the Iliad, real animals, real people, real light attending everything.” I feel the same about Mario’s message; it has real waves in it, real stars, real wind, real fishing nets, real heartbeats.

In an uncanny, poignant twist of fate, Il Postino comes to exemplify these qualities, the film itself holding a trace of the reality that shaped it. Of course, to a degree, this is true of all cinema; there is something inherently magical and spellbinding about the projector’s resurrection of the past, unavoidably, even inevitably spectral. And yet, the story behind Il Postino feels particularly resonant.

As a teenager, Massimo Troisi suffered a serious bout of rheumatic fever, leading to complications with his heart. “After a quadruple bypass when he was 19,” reflected Radford in The Guardian in 2011, “he knew that sooner or later he was going to need a heart transplant.” By the early 1990s, Troisi’s heart was beginning to weaken. On the third day of shooting Il Postino, he collapsed. Following a brief recovery, he and Radford made the decision to continue working on the film, adapting their schedule to meet the actor’s physical requirements; Troisi could only shoot for one hour a day, the majority of his dialogue scenes adjusted so that Mario is sitting down, a convincing body double brought in to perform most of the cycling scenes. “You know, I don’t really want this new heart,” Troisi had said to Radford, several years earlier. “Because the heart is the center of emotion, and an actor is a man of emotion. Who knows what kind of an actor I’m going to be with someone else’s heart inside of me.” On the day he finished shooting, Troisi left Procida to stay with his sister near Rome. The following day, he died from a heart attack, aged 41.

“The cinema is the art of ghosts,” says the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in Ken McCullen’s Ghost Dance (1983). “A battle of phantoms. That’s what I think the cinema’s about, when it’s not boring. It’s the art of allowing ghosts to come back.” At Troisi’s funeral, his body double walked behind the coffin, causing several superstitious mourners to believe he was the actor’s ghost. Derrida’s sentiment is one that seems apparent in the language used by Radford in The Guardian. “It is almost 17 years since the death of Massimo Troisi,” he writes, “yet he is as present in my life as he was when he lived.”

In The Lyric Now (2020), the American poet and critic James Longenbach considers the persistent staying power of poetry. “[W]hatever else it may be,” he writes, “a poem is a work of art made of words, and the way in which a particular poem’s language creates the repeatable event of itself is my preoccupation.” For Longenbach, all lyric poems express the linear and circular. While they take place in time—“sentence by sentence, line by line”—“what’s happening in the poem [ . . . ] is happening now,” in the moment of our reading, resurrected to the present. “[W]hether written in 1920 or 2020,” he concludes, “a poem creates the moment as we enter it. The poem is happening now.” We might think of a famous fragment of 1819, when John Keats conjures an image of a hand, “veins red [with] life [ . . . ] again,” a hand that seems to reach us from the pages of the poem: “see here it is – / I hold it towards you.”

For Il Postino, Troisi was posthumously nominated for two Academy Awards—Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. “[I]n a way, he’s still alive though the movie,” suggested Maria Grazia Cucinotta of her co-star. “I always say: he left his heart inside it.”

---

Rowland Bagnall is a poet and art writer based in Oxford, UK. His second collection, Near-Life Experience (Carcanet, 2024) was an Observer Poetry Book of the Month. He currently serves as Reviews Editor at Oxford Poetry, and writes about photography for The Art Newspaper. rowlandbagnall.com