when the film creates an unforgettable character, the pathetic and heroic bard of Colombia

Winner of the Jury Prize in the section Un Certain Regard de Cannes, the Horizontes Award in San Sebastian, a great success in his country, Colombia, and praised by enthusiastic critics around the world, Poet connect to the panels to prevent noise hype who turned her into her a “joyful independent surprise” of the time. Cabe decirlo ya, no deception, asombra.

Poet It has an indelible virtue: it builds an extraordinary personality. This “poet”, Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Ríos), is also an absolute disaster, the hero of our time. A true monument of fiction, tender and painful, silly as lucid and ridiculous as fascinating in its outward way.

The sea of ​​opposites represented in the actor Ubeimar Ríos without experience, with such precision and talent that it is enough to see it (fallen men, lost sight between sarcasm and love) to understand that we recognize any human being in any way. Something we will remove. Deep love. As Oscar Wilde said, work is the bane of children’s classes.

The figure of the “poet” is indeed the most hyperbolic in art, the poet is electricity summary artist, a spiritual state that transcends one’s disciplines. If you can be a poet-writer, a poet-painter and a poet-filmmaker. In the case of Restrepo, he wrote verses, or wrote them, at the age of 25 I had little success and more than twenty years later continue to review this new recognition.

“Usted is not a poet, usted is desempleado,” he says to hermana, who has little regard for her. Restrepo lives with his mother who wants him, has a drinking problem and refuses to have a regular job that supports him because he is writing the book he is currently writing. Likewise, he has a teenage hija who feels respect for who he intends to redeem himself with. Because Restrepo, which has done the most, is trying to “change”.

Social satire

Poet If he has such a sad, pathetic and funny character that makes you want to watch him for hours, he creates an entire plot for his friend. You know, no good action goes unpunished, and that thing happens, very often, when the main character finally accepts that he is a philosophy professor at the institute. Fascinated by a student with poetic talent, Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), he becomes obsessed with helping her to triumph.

The character of Restrepo, unable to understand the rules of life, marginal as a state of mind and not so much for social or political reasons, is universal. Colombia as a country no ace. Director El, Mesa Soto, retrata a a strange man who is all over the world but also with his honest and idealistic view of the entire country marked by social longings.

A country that also exists observed through a type of good condescension through the eyes of a representative of the Low Countries, a fervent believer that art “sacrifices street children and delinquency”. Not only her, the local apostles of the “house of poetry” who recommend Yurlady, who writes about “the color of her skin and the obstacles of her surroundings” and not about her intimate experience. In the clarity that he is also condemned, Restrepo rebels and tells the girl that he is smoking in the fireplace.

The film is often too large, sometimes it is larger than the size, but in some cases it is always the same. Briefly, the director introduces sharp snippets of visual poetry (the reflection of the sun’s rays on a house, unsuspecting) to show how he is a “poet” for many stupid people, while maintaining the quality that in all cases, paying bills and running from one side to the other, we are lost, the ability to see life, however parodic the poetry.