I just finished watching
Il Postino -- it's been years since I saw it. It's lovely, really lovely. What I like most is its steady uncompromising gaze into the contradiction of a famous celebrity being the poet of the people and the uneasy relationship of the people's poet to the people. It tracks the development of Pablo Neruda's relationship to his postman on the small Italian island where he stayed during one of his periods of exile from Chile -- from irritation to amusement, to honest but inevitably shallow affection. Neruda is happy to serve as the postman's best man at the wedding he aided and abetted, but promptly forgets him as soon as he is out of sight -- there is an utterly heartbreaking scene where a letter arrives from Chile weeks after the poet's leaving the island and rather than the personal letter the poet promised to write, it is a note from his secretary instructing as to where to ship his things. The film looks steadily at this casual thoughtless cruelty from the man beloved for writing of love and known as champion of the common working man -- and concludes that in the end, it doesn't matter. Rather than his poetry being tainted or belied by his failings as a human being, the poetry in the end is what was true, what effected a transformation within the postman's soul. This transformation comes from within the postman -- though the poetry may have come from outside, it called to and was answered by something deep within him. The poetry was a catalyst, nothing more, but nothing less -- and its effect was not lessened by the poet's casual disregard for what he had wrought.
I also like the parallels drawn between the postman's awakening sense of poetry and of politics -- both initially incited by admiration and imitation of Neruda, but which awaken something deeper within him. His strengthening communist convictions and anger at the way the people of the island are used by the local big man is authentic, and it doesn't really matter that they were initially inspired by a communist who lived what was for the island a rich man's life. There's a wonderful scene where Neruda complains that the water has run out, and the postman explains how the water delivery by ship only comes every few weeks and suggests he has been using too much -- "Not too much; I use what I need" says Neruda. "Yes that'll be too much" says the postman.
The fact that in the end it is a combination of his poetry and his political conviction which gets the postman killed is also somehow right -- the film has the amazing ability to make it seem like a triumph, not a tragedy. And of course the fact that this was the last film by Massimo Troisi who played the postman and who was the whole reason the film was made (it was he who originally optioned the movie rights of the book and started the project), that he died very soon after making the film, and that indeed chose not to have the heart transplant he needed during the film's production for fear he would die and leave it unfinished -- all this makes it that much more bittersweet. This is the kind of movie I like -- able to look honestly at honest sentiment and not become sentimental.
And of course I bawled like a baby.