A POET (A-minus) - Whether you find this tale of a sad sack heartbreaking or not will depend on your tolerance for struggling artists with drinking problems. I found it bittersweet and quite moving.
Ubeimar Rios stars as Oscar, a not-so-lovable loser who lives with his ailing mom as he approaches middle age. He is a diehard poet, a self-proclaimed tortured artist whose demons are doused only by getting blackout drunk on the sidewalks of Medellin in Colombia (more than once we see him wake up in the morning on concrete and limp home). He fumbles the most basic adult tasks -- he's a lousy, broke father to his high-school-age daughter Daniela (Alisson Correa) -- and he is blinded by his devotion to the beloved poet Jose Asuncion Silva, who died at 30 by a self-inflicted gunshot to the heart. In a small gut-wrenching scene, we watch Oscar sitting on the edge of the bed, shirtless, and using a black marker to draw a heart in the middle of his chest. He is quick to sob.
In a word, Oscar is miserable -- until he reluctantly takes a job teaching and latches on to a student who shows a lot of promise as a poet. Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) needs a confidence boost, and she is distracted by an overstuffed household of siblings and relatives. Writer-director Simon Mesa Soto revels in the chaos among the busy brood, with little to no judgment of their working-poor lifestyle. Upon taking Yurlady under his wing, Oscar gets sober, seizing on the opportunity to replace his stalled career with the hopes of the next generation to break through.
Of course, this is not destined to go smoothly. Oscar is not the best candidate for long-term sobriety. When he chaperones Yurlady and her classmates to an adult literary event and the kids misbehave, Oscar's self-control begins to unravel.
Soto walks a tightrope throughout between humor and pathos. He does not gloss over the debilitating heartache that Oscar carries with him at all times, but he finds the day-to-day humor in the lowly adventures of a bumbling sad sack. Rios, with a stricken homeliness of Allen Ginsberg, shuffles from scene to scene. He alternates between petulant family squabbles to passionate polemics about the classic poets to incoherent babbling about his long-stalled publishing career. When he first starts teaching, he is sloppy drunk in front of the students. While it is disturbing, it is also successfully played for uneasy laughs, as the students take it in stride. Meantime, his effort at reconciling with his teenage daughter is more laughable than funny; he obviously has a form of PTSD that links her birth to the drying up of his writing abilities. But he's trying.
I can say that I laughed, I squirmed. There are no easy answers offered to Oscar's plight or to the problems of the underclass in Medellin. But the film is full of heart. Do I have to draw a picture for you?
BONUS TRACK
A lovely interlude from "A Poet," Los Zafiros with "La Luna en tu Mirada":
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