The movie that we watched in class, called “Il Postino” (The Postman) is about a poor man living in Italy, who gets a job delivering mail to a famous poet, Pablo Neruda, during his exile. The postman, Mario, is very excited to meet the poet, and though the Neruda and Mario are rigged with eachother in beginning, their relationship grows into a beautiful friendship. In the beginning of the movie, it was very slow, quiet, not much excitement. It was important however, because it set up Mario’s situation, letting the audience know what his life was like and what his father thought of him. Overall, I think the movie was pleasant, I think the general theme was that you can do whatever you want if you set your mind to it. I really enjoyed seeing the characters saying that they couldn’t do something, or thought something was evil, but ended up doing it anyway without even knowing it. The only thing I disliked was how Neruda totally forgot about Mario at the end of the movie, and didn’t come back until Mario died.
During the movie, one can observe a lot of details about social class during this time. One of the major conflicts in the movie was the man running for governor. During the movie, we see that people who could read and write had a major influence, and illiterate people in the city followed whatever literate people said, instead of thinking for themselves. Mario knew the candidate wouldn’t give any of the things that he was promising, but never voiced his opinion until he started talking to Neruda, who is literate and a big influence on people even today. I think the theme that describes this best is voice your own opinion and not the opinions of others. An example would be when Mario tells the candidate that if he becomes governor, “all of the work will halt”, and that everyone knew it. After he said that, everyone in the restaurant grunted in unison, agreeing to what Mario had said. No one had done it before, even though they all know it was the truth.
There are many forms of love in the movie also. The one that is most evident is the love between Mario and Beatrice. At first, Mario has nothing but pure lust for Beatrice, and interprets it as love. However, as time went on and they get to know eachother the two fall deeply in love. Mario depended completely on Neruda’s poetry to win Beatrice over, and it worked. So I think a theme suitable for this is that words are powerful enough to provoke love. Some evidence of this is that when Beatrice’s mother found out about the poem, she immediately chastised Beatrice, thinking that she had let Mario see her naked, because of his eloquence with words.
Poetry is heavily featured in the movie; and there are many things to say about what the movie says about poetry, but I think the largest message was that everyone doesn’t understand poetry. Mario, for instance, didn’t think he could be a poet because he was a simple man, whose father was a fisherman and his father’s father and so on. Neruda, however, showed Mario that anyone could be anything if they put their mind to it. One example is the metaphors that Mario makes throughout the movie, even though he insists that he can’t. Even Beatrice’s mother makes metaphors while she claims that poetry is evil and wrong. Everyone is a poet in some way, and everything that someone says can be interpreted as poetry. People don’t realize that the little things they say can affect and inspire people in different ways. That is what I think poetry is, and in the movie, it seems like the people in the town thought poetry was supposed to be pretty and it had to rhyme and it you had to understand it. I think a theme to describe this is that no one can totally understand the meaning behind a poem, unless you wrote it. Because everyone can get a different feeling or meaning from a poem. I think the scene from the movie that best fits this theme is when Mario asks Neruda to explain one of his poems, but he tells him that he can’t because then it would lose its meaning.
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