You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Il Postino (1994), 105 minutes
Director: Michael Radford
Producer: Mario Cecchi Gori for Miramax
Distributed on Touchstone Home Video
‘WANTED—POSTMAN WITH BICYCLE.’ Only a temporary job, but almost tailor-made for Mario (Massimo Troisi), an introverted and uneducated yet sharply insightful young man, protagonist of Michael Radford's delightfully bitter-sweet, humane, humorous, moving yet never sentimental, comedy Il Postino. The job involves carrying the mail to just one illustrious addressee, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret) exiled in the early 1950s to the Southern Italian island of Procida because of his communist views. Every day Mario pedals up to the poet's new residence—a villa located on the top of a hill, surrounded by wild Mediterranean vegetation and overlooking the sea—carrying a leather bag full of correspondence: mostly, at least in his adolescent mind fuelled by newsreel mythology, love letters from adoring women all over the world.
At first, of course, Mario and Neruda hardly talk. What is there to be said, anyway, between them? Intrigued by his own thoughts and feelings, the postman cannot find the words to express them and the poet has better things to do than listen to him. But, as the relationship develops, Mario finds an interlocutor and, with it, a voice: tentative at first, when he dares, after a farcical rehearsal in front of the mirror, ask the poet for an autograph in the hope that this will impress his girlfriends in Naples—then progressively more secure. In Neruda-the-Man he gradually discovers the parental figure to identify with and idealise; in Neruda-the-Poet the language to make sense of his inner world. If Mario's real father is a silent, down-to-earth (or down-to-sea) fisherman with little understanding of his son's existential problems (‘I am tired of being a man’, Mario says echoing Neruda's words), his dead mother is entirely absent—other than, that is, in the guises of Nature, both literally in the external wor