‘A Poet’ review: A failed Colombian poet mentors a promising young talent

Dir/scr: Simon Mesa Soto. Colombia/Germany/Sweden. 2025. 123mins

“I’m a poet,” protests the put-upon protagonist of Colombian Simon Mesa Soto’s Un Sure Regard title. “Truly, you’re unemployed,” comes his sister’s retort, an change which tidily summarises the topic of this participating piece a few washed-up Medellin bard looking for religious redemption. Pushed by a compelling efficiency from non-professional Ubeimar Rios as a person out of time, Mesa Soto’s second function is concurrently satisfyingly tragic and hilarious.

Deftly touches on themes of latest significance 

It additionally indicators a return to Cannes for the filmmaker who competed on the competition with each his quick movies Mom (2016) and Leidi (2014) – the latter successful the quick movie Palme d’Or – and performed Critics Week together with his 2022 function debut Amparo, which netted star Sandra Melissa Torres the strand’s Rising Star Award. As with that movie, additional competition play is probably going for A Poet, and Epicentre secured French rights forward of its Cannes debut.

Protagonist Oscar Restrepo’s (Rios) final literary success was a poetry award within the Nineties. He has finished little since apart from stay out the parable of the road poet, like a lesser-known Colombian Bukowski. In the true world, this interprets into consuming an excessive amount of, residing in digital penury together with his sick mom Teresita (Margarita Soto), humiliatingly borrowing cash from his teenage daughter Daniela (Alisson Correa) – who later confesses, painfully, to feeling pity for her father – and signing up for dodgy money-making schemes that by no means go anyplace.

On Oscar’s living-room wall there’s a portrait of his hero, the nice Columbian poet José Asunción Silva, who shot himself at 30. “You may obtain recognition after dying,” Oscar’s extra profitable buddy Efrain (Guillermo Cardona) tells him, “however first you’d must have written an incredible poem. And also you haven’t finished that.” It’s line in a movie whose early half is teeming with them.

Oscar takes half in first a poetry studying (considerably attended solely by middle-aged male poets) after which a chat present on native TV: bleak comedian humiliation is the inevitable consequence. However when he’s supplied a job educating in a college, Oscar is struck by the beautiful drawings and poems within the pocket book of 15-year-old Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade), who lives along with her monumental, chaotic household within the outskirts of Medellin. Oscar decides to do some good on this planet by mentoring her, to form Yurlady into the nice poet he did not develop into. 

The canny however morally appalling Efrain, whose success relies on the notion that success as a poet is giving folks what they need to hear, decides that Yurlady ought to begin off the native poetry competition with a poem “about her pores and skin color”. She delivers her poem and the awfulness of her life is duly applauded by the Columbian cultural class. However on the celebration celebration, Yurlady collapses unconscious within the rest room, main right into a bleakly farcical and fewer targeted third act wherein, if attainable, Oscar’s shame intensifies nonetheless additional.

That is very a lot Oscar’s movie, and Rios performs him to perfection. A Poet can be a really troublesome movie to look at if it was merely scene after scene of abject humiliation, however shortly the viewer warms to this character. There’s a saintlike purity and therefore pathos about our mad, misunderstood hero – together with his buck tooth, his examine shirts, his barely hunched determine, his limitless resilience and his immense power – as a result of he’s the beautiful a lot the one particular person right here motivated by one thing apart from cash. 

There are many secondary performances to get pleasure from, in addition to a lot verbal and visible wit. However the sombre coronary heart of A Poet is within the relationship between Oscar and Yurlady, which is drawn and carried out with tenderness and emotional directness. There’s the sense that Oscar has a substantial amount of hope invested within the quietly successful Yurlady, who appears completely baffled by why this outdated man has taken this curiosity in her. Simply as Oscar, who has been a foul father, is likely to be looking for to now develop into one, Yurlady, whose personal father is absent, is likely to be looking for one. 

Dialogue-driven and typically meandering, initially A Poet gives the look of being as shambolic as Oscar himself however, by way of Soto’s carefully-honed script, it deftly touches on themes of latest significance. One is the commercialisation of artwork, the dying of creativity as a car of private expression – one non-too refined scene has an indigenous man and a girl vociferously arguing with one another about which ones is worse off in society.

One other subject is the marginalisation of other voices equivalent to Oscar’s – each establishment he’s part of, from his household to the varsity he works for, finally ends up turning towards him. One other is how little compassion he appears to advantage when the unfaithful accusations of sexual impropriety begin to accumulate, as they have to, within the overextended third act. For all its humour and the mild redemption it guarantees on the finish, A Poet provides as much as a damning portrait of a spiritually impoverished society, one which wants its harmless madmen and dreamers greater than it dares admit.