‘A Poet’ Review: A Sharp Satire of Latin American Cultural Gatekeeping
In this Colombian film, a failed poet discovers a young woman with a gift for poetry and gets himself into trouble trying to help her succeed.
What a lovely moon tonight / Round as a piece of fruit / And if it were to fall / What a fucking moon that would be.” No, those are not the kinds of poems written by Oscar, the poet who gives this witty Colombian comedy-drama its title. But that is exactly the sort of verse a drunken would-be “poet” suggests he try, if he wants to succeed and stop being the failure that he is. Oscar is unlucky. Nothing ever goes right for him. His books never sold, he cannot hold down a steady job because of his alcoholism, he has “invested” his savings in one of those African prince scams, and his daughter wants nothing to do with him. Everything he touches seems doomed to fail, and even his fellow writers no longer take him seriously.
To make matters worse, Oscar is stubbornly principled. He refuses to “sell out,” to commercialize what he considers his sacred and meaningful talent—now reduced to a couple of slim poetry books gathering dust in bargain bins at Medellín bookstores. When he is invited onto a TV show, he freezes on camera, allowing a smug local bureaucrat and a reggaeton star performing a song called “Wet My Jacuzzi” to steal the spotlight. Broke, nearly family-less (he is in his early fifties and still lives with his mother), and with no real future in sight, Oscar drifts in circles while watching other writers receive public recognition, further fueling his bitterness. If nothing else, he never misses a chance to bad-mouth Gabriel García Márquez and hit the aguardiente hard.
Eventually, he is talked into taking a teaching job—despite the fact that not even the school authorities want him there. Unsurprisingly, he shows up drunk on his very first day. When everything seems headed toward yet another disappointment—most of his students openly mock his pathetic, alcohol-soaked attempts at teaching—he meets Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), a gifted student whose notebooks, overflowing with poems, reveal unmistakable raw talent. Oscar recognizes it immediately and decides to help her, convinced she is a true artist in the making. That choice, however, turns out to be deeply problematic. Un poeta is, precisely, about that: the mostly failed attempts of a confused, broken man to fix his own life—and, in the process, the lives of others.
Played by Ubeimar Ríos with a perfect balance of pathos, frustration, and discomfort with the real world, Oscar is a principled but defeated man facing a society that insists on turning everything into a business opportunity. A Poet skewers hustling writers and their empty literary associations, teachers who show little concern for their students until problems explode in their faces, international cultural institutions with their eurocentric ideas of what Latin American culture should look like (a criticism that applies just as well to cinema), Yurlady’s family trying to profit from her promise, and even fellow literature students more worried about trends than about writing what they actually want to write.
Amid all this, Oscar keeps messing things up. His intentions are good, but that counts for very little. Something similar happens to Yurlady, though from a different angle: she is genuinely talented, yet she has little interest in building a career or “making it” as a poet. She does not want to become an icon or a token figure—the “brown-skinned poet from the poor neighborhoods.” She simply enjoys filling notebooks with whatever crosses her mind. Soon enough, however, she is expected to “represent the marginalized peoples of Latin America,” or something along those lines, and things inevitably become complicated.
The new film by the director of the award-winning short Leidi and of the feature Amparo—which screened at Cannes Critics’ Week in 2021—works both as an accessible, popular comedy and as a sharp commentary on the state of culture in Latin America. While its focus here is literature, the observations could easily be applied to cinema as well. The narrative model and plot turns are fairly classical, and at times the film indulges in one too many scenes of excessive misery. Still, it eventually reconnects with its strongest qualities thanks to the emotional honesty and decency of its troubled protagonists. Oscar knows he will not fully rebuild his life, nor reconcile with his daughter, simply by helping a young poet. But he does realize that it is at least a step in the right direction. And in life, that counts for something.
