“Poet” Wins Big: A Look at the Award-Winning Film & Its Complex Characters
If you’re a fan of films that follow a protagonist on a singular journey, exploring their story to its fullest extent, then you might be captivated by Colombian director Simon Mesa Soto’s “Poet.” This acclaimed work, which won the Golden Star at the recent El Gouna Film Festival, is a compelling melodrama that also received the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
A Poet’s Struggles
The film centers around Oscar (Obimar Ross), a troubled philosophy professor and poet. Approaching sixty, Oscar still resides in his aging mother’s home, a man obsessed with poetry. He lives a borrowed life, seemingly hiding behind it. The film, however, delves deeper, highlighting that loving something is only a small part of the path to success. Love, the film suggests, does not guarantee salvation. In this sense, the film departs from clichés, presenting its poet with a mirror reflecting his deteriorating psychological, economic, and social circumstances, where poetry becomes a battlefield rather than a refuge.
Oscar, divorced and estranged from his daughter, clings to the illusion that his belief in being a cursed poet, for whom suffering is the only path to creativity, keeps him alive. He embodies the caricature of the intellectual at a bar, drawing inspiration from his bitterness. Oscar capitalizes on this image, seeking meaning in a world hostile to him and his ideas. However, his core struggle isn’t an artistic crisis but an inability to sustain life as a whole, as a person disconnected from the world. He strives to transition from being a poet in his own eyes to becoming one in the eyes of others. The film challenges the audience to consider the complexities of art, success, and the human condition.
Yurlady’s Influence
The film’s narrative expands with the introduction of Yurlady (Rebecca Andrade), a young woman from a poor family who writes beautiful poems with genuine spontaneity. Oscar sees in her the talent he can help nurture, encouraging her to enter a poetry competition. Despite Oscar’s efforts, he fails to play the role of Pygmalion. The film, in its essence, is a work that beautifies those with modest talent who only create disasters when they venture further into making good around them. The film, driven by a certain belief that their disasters are the most beautiful disasters, presents a film that alleviates the intensity of class conflicts, preferring to strike in all directions rather than aligning with one side.
A Complex Portrait
In his second feature-length directorial experience, Soto does not create a film “about” poetry as much as he creates a film “through” poetry. It evolves into a hybrid portrait of a miserable poet, using secondary characters that he keeps on the edge of caricature, and sometimes they are gray. The film takes a critical look at the poetry circles and those who are tasked with teaching them, those who retreat at the first sign of danger, even if it is a danger resulting from false accusations. In this aspect, the film does not compromise or appease, displaying the injustice to which the poet is subjected in the name of protecting some vulnerable groups, leaving him without immunity of any kind.
In his first experiences in front of the camera, Obimar Ross presents an ambiguous face of the internal conflict, which the film draws its manifestations with a remarkable dynamic. The film makes us feel guilty because we sometimes laugh at moments, which are, in the end, nothing but the tragedies of others. The film, in its essence, is a work that beautifies those with modest talent who only create disasters when they venture further into making good around them.
Source: Annahar
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