Burning Patience Review: A Love Story, But Without Passion Netflix Movie About Pablo Neruda

Cast: Andrew Bargsted, Vivianne Dietz

Director: Rodrigo Sepúlveda

Streaming Platform: Netflix

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

Although in our review of Burning Patience we will see how Rodrigo Sepúlveda’s film took the title of the book of the same name which inspired it, what it lacks is the poetics that the filmmaker Michael Radford had put in 1994 in The Postman, but even more so the many hands that had collaborated for the creation of the screenplay based on the novel by Antonio Skármeta. Anna Pavignano was there, with Furio and Giacomo Scarpelli. And then there was the director himself together with his protagonist Massimo Troisi, who had declared that “I want to make this film with my heart”.

The first adaptation took the subject of the novel and lengthened it, revisited it, filling it with the magic of a work that gave a last farewell to the Neapolitan actor, in a beautiful gloss which is what the postman himself reserves for his characters. All that is missing in the Netflix version of Pablo Larraín’s Fabula production company, which is much more compliant with the standards of the platform, even if it is also looking for its own identity.

Burning Patience Review: The Story

It is from the drafting of the story that all the differences are noticed both from the 1986 novel and from the cinematographic variant of the mid-nineties. The protagonist always has the name Mario (Andrew Bargsted), and he too embarks on a career as a postman. However, his deliveries are very specific: he will become the official messenger of the poet Pablo Neruda of Isla Negra. Thus, it will be that the young man, first a fisherman and then a future lover of verses, will begin to learn the rudiments of art such as that of poetry and what effects he can have on people.

Precisely through writing Mario will try to conquer the beautiful Beatriz (Vivianne Dietz), albeit against the will of the girl’s mother. A love that seems forbidden because it is volatile as words can be. But despite the obstacles and the distance, despite the misunderstandings and the little lies, the feeling of the two young people will remain too great, so much so that it cannot be contained only in their letters.

Burning Patience Review and Analysis

Seeking a personal identity, Burning Patience also tries to bring out a soul that is only one’s own and that can give dignity and find a place for its characters in the cinematographic panorama. Therefore, what director Rodrigo Sepúlveda is aiming for, based on a screenplay by Guillermo Calderón (who also created another work on the poet such as Nedura di Larraín), is a romanticism that goes hand in hand with the caressing setting of the story. It is a rarefied air, where conflicts never really seem such, and where each protagonist will be able to get what he set for himself. It is an extremely calm that one breathes in the film, which chooses to make a more tender operation to all intents and purposes, preferring to concentrate on the wishes of its fresh poets rather than on the power and responsibility of words.

Ardent Patience fails to reach not so much the spirit as the mind of the spectators. The film only superficially exposes its reasoning for the use of words, their potential for fire and the mark they can leave on people. Too bland an attempt to explain how a verse can mean the world: a world that fails to be contained in the dialogues or speeches about the poetry of the film. A test that instead brings to mind the splendid semiotic work carried out by The Postman, and how the film combined the sounds of evil and of the island on which Pablo Neruda was in exile.

Dazzling poems, on which to lean your ear and understand what it means to love. A work that is not only superior but a metaphor for what it means to conquer with art, a passion that is missing in the Netflix production, and also free from wonderful music such as those that have remained iconic by Luis Bacalov and Sergio Endrigo, winners of the Academy Award. If Mario in Burning Patience fails to find a way to compose his ode to his own Beatrice, the film fails to convey how a sonnet can move a soul predisposed to art. Words that are never decanted, but only recited for an anonymous work, which simply tends to become a love story. A film therefore forgettable, like a verse left to the wind.

It’s a different type of film, that of Sepúlveda, all right, which aims to reconcile and entertain without trauma, but it ends up emerging as a mediocre counterpoint cut off from reality, a sweetened tale and oleographic postcard that winks at lost time and frees the stories of individuals from collective history, preferring a dusty nostalgia. Paradoxically, Radford and Troisi’s film, with all its export clichés, managed to have greater political awareness. And then Neruda: more than a monumental icon, he seems to us to be a subsidiary figure and the whole famous repertoire of famous phrases (the discourse on metaphors, the poetry that does not belong to the writer) appears more pretentious than elegiac.

Burning Patience Review: The Last Words

Burning Patience takes on the figure of Pablo Neruda and a love story that is consumed thanks to words but fails to insert any passion either in the relationships or in the atmosphere of the film. Words are light or conditioning energy. They have their vibration, and can reach the most distant and ideal places; go beyond barred worlds, and let the divine pass through our hands, allowing us to arrive in the places ordered by desire. This is what the Netflix film should have represented, but the feature film only superficially exposes this reasoning on the use of words, on their incendiary power that can “cut” people’s skin.