An Artist Suffers

There’s an intentionally unvarnished quality to Colombian Academy Award entry “A Poet,” Simón Mesa Soto’s zany, occasionally slapstick comedy-drama about a waning artiste and the student he mentors. Its story of middle-aged poet and distant father Oscar Restrepo (first-time actor Ubeimar Rios) is captured on vibrant 16mm film stock, but its edges bear the shadows of debris from the celluloid camera, creating a ragged frame to match its protagonist’s frayed emotional state. The result is an energetic piece that draws constant attention to its own artifice and, thus, to the very process of creating art — a process that has slowly pummeled and defeated Oscar over several decades.

We first meet Oscar, a high school poetry teacher,  as he stumbles, inebriated, through the Medellín nightlife, promising to pay back friends-turned-creditors. He’s a quintessential loser: 50-something, divorced and living with his ailing mother, while his estranged teenage daughter Daniela (Alisson Correa) rolls her eyes and berates him whenever he comes to visit. He’s an irresponsible manchild who can’t seem to escape the self-defeating cycles of his own making. He also hasn’t written a new poem in many years, a fact we learn when he tries to have his old collection republished for some quick cash, and the photo on the back cover is of a significantly younger and bright-eyed Oscar — a spark that has long since vanished.

These cinematic hallmarks of a down-on-his luck bozo are, on paper, rote and familiar. However, they’re sublimated into something pulsing and tangible by its lead actor, in a debut performance of such alluring weirdness that it’s hard to picture Rios as anything but a seasoned veteran. Hunched over, as though compressed by life’s pressures, and peering at the world uncomfortably from behind thick glasses, he’s a wonderfully pathetic (and sympathetic) sad clown. We see him promise to pay for Daniela’s college dreams in one breath, then attempt to borrow taxi change from her in the very next, the camera zooming in on him for comic emphasis.  

The film’s hilarity and melancholy clash further when, during an ill-considered day-drinking spree at school, he discovers that among his disaffected students, one of them, a girl named Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) has a genuine interest in poetry  and pens beautiful musings about the world around her. He decides to take her under his wing. “Do you also live in profound sadness?” he asks her, as though searching for a like-minded companion, though he’s met with a swift and puzzled “No.” Like Oscar, Yurlady is economically disadvantaged, which seems to be just as much of an impetus for his mentorship as her actual talents. Oscar is convinced that “suffering is the raw material of poetry,” a mantra that guides his elegiac approach to teaching, and to associating with fellow poets and artists. 

And yet, the central irony of “A Poet” is that this core belief still isn’t enough to propel Oscar to return to his passion. Instead, his desire to both live vicariously through Yurlady, and to shape her as a kind of daughter figure — an indirect, perhaps subconscious act of repentance — leads him to make ethically dubious decisions surrounding entering Yurlady into poetry competitions. It’s practically a heist film at times, where the object isn’t cracking a safe, but getting Yurlady to the next event without her school or family finding out.

Mesa Soto’s abrupt, elliptical scene transitions, born of hard cuts and harsh sounds, demand our attention at every turn. As purposefully disorienting as the movie’s editing structure is, Oscar’s awkward presence is our guide between each scene, and the only constant in a world that feels hell-bent on pushing artists to the margins. The optics of his dynamic with Yurlady come off as unsavory to the outside world — it isn’t long before he’s accused of impropriety — but Rios’ infectious, puppy dog enthusiasm provides an intriguing contrast between what he’s accused of and what his intentions actually are, enhancing the movie’s live-wire comedy.

However, just as Mesa Soto draws on Oscar’s immediate financial circumstances, the iconography around him is an equally powerful catalyst for his feelings of inadequacy as a poet who no longer writes poetry. Colombian peso bills are adorned with the faces of great writers like Gabriel García Márquez and poets like José Asunción Silva — the latter of whom looms over Oscar as a portrait in his mother’s home, practically taunting him — creating an ever-present connection between capital and artistry, a union of which Oscar falls short of achieving.

That Oscar is under the misguided belief that he must suffer for his art but rarely transforms his constant suffering into anything meaningful speaks to his superficial understanding of the image of the artist, or the poet, as a tortured genius. Through wry comedy and gentle domestic drama, Mesa Soto pokes a hole in this long-standing framing of artistry by giving Oscar something not only worth suffering for — i.e., reclaiming the love of two daughters — but by giving him reasons to stop pillorying himself in the first place. That Oscar suffers is often uproarious, but that he’s finally driven to transcend his own misery is what makes “A Poet” so bittersweet.