Title: A Poet
Foreign Title: Un poeta
Year: 2025
Country: Colombia/Germany/Sweden
Language: In Spanish with English subtitles
Director: Simón Mesa Soto
What’d he do before he started not making a living writing poetry?”- Dashiell Hammett
There are way too many words “about” poetry, what it does and doesn’t do and what it means to people these days and this quote by the hard-boiled detective story writer serves our film’s purpose well. Just as well that our hero Oscar is Oscar Restrepo, a most common Colombian surname, named either for the medic PFC Juan Sebastian Restrepo who shot four drunken soldiers in his platoon or just Restrepo, the common Everyman, the everyman whose claim to fame is that he’s a poet which, in today’s world, is no fame at all (as documented in Bob Dylan’s paradox of a world: “She knows there’s no success like failure, and that failure’s no success at all”.) There, in a nutshell, is our lost boy-man-poet Oscar, who once published a slim book of poems with its telling title, The Obsoletes, but that was years ago, when he was passionate, restless, leaving him a world-weary but not world-travelled has-been, the black sheep in his family. ‘If he doesn’t find a job soon, out on the street he will go’ (so says his brother-in-law). Oscar can’t help himself these days, scrounging for an extra ten off his mother before drinking it all away. He’s also divorced with a daughter he has alienated with his drunkenness who will be needing money before she begins college in the fall.
Can poetry save this poet? Oscar is obsessed by the melancholic 19th century Colombian poet José Asunción Silva, who committed suicide at age 30. And yet, as in every good film, an impossible opportunity finally arrives with a job teaching poetry at the local school. At the same time, he encounters the poems of one of his students, Yurlady, a mostly reticent teen whose notebook is overflowing with words and drawings that belie her age. She knows little of the ins and outs of poetizing or what she will have to undergo if she is destined for what Oscar promises as the big cash prize awaiting her.
In Yurlady, Oscar suddenly realizes that his life has found a purpose, but first she needs to be elevated ‘above her station’. (When asked what she wants to be, she talks about doing make-up, doing hair, and learning to do nails.) She shows off her nails. Nonetheless, Oscar perseveres and grooms the girl for her big day. During the school’s Poetry Festival, a prize is presented to a promising young poet. (Yurlady is a shoo-in.) Oscar uses his own money to convince her to compete. She goes home with a big bag of groceries. When Oscar sees her environment, poverty, a family of ten, all Yurlady’s siblings who have children of their own, the mother who he visits once a week, he sees that the stakes for both his and Yurlady’s future could not be higher.
Billed as a comedy, the film takes some Benigni-worthy turns before Yurlady reaches the concluding “stanza” of her unexpected experience as a recognized poet.
As Oscar Restrepo, first-time performer Ubeimar Rios sails through the role even as he admits the many similarities between himself and the character he portrayed. Rebeca Andrade’s is so natural in her role of Yurlady that one wonders how these first timers could deliver such realistic performances. For his part, director Simón Mesa Soto presents an unassailable subtext of the economic and social factors which contributed to the mesmerizing realism in the film.
