Neruda pablo larrain jackie

A version of this article first appeared in Screen’s monthly magazine.

Pablo Larrain sounds almost giddy with anticipation when Screen International reaches him by phone in Santiago, where he is entrenched in post-production on Jackie with only a few weeks to go before the world premiere in Venice.

“I’m so proud of the movie,” says the Chilean auteur. “I’m looking at the effects we’re starting to do.

Neruda pablo larrain jackie robinson

I think it’s beautiful.”

Beyond that Larrain declines to elaborate. It is not an arrogance thing: one gets the sense the director wants the audience to share in his journey of discovery and come to his films armed only with curiosity and an open mind.

And so cinephiles must pick at morsels before the Lido feast: a foreboding first-look image of Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and a well-worn logline about how the film chronicles through her eyes the days immediately before and after the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy.

Those who have seen it canno