PAGE TO SCREEN : A Long-Distance Adaptation

“Burning Patience,” by Antonio Skarmeta, is an erotic comedy in which Chilean poet Pablo Neruda teaches a village postman the language of love. Because the postman is a wildly hormonal adolescent, this is a little like giving him a loaded gun, with metaphors substituting for bullets. “Naked you are as blue as a Cuban night,” the postman writes to his beloved, ripping off Neruda and setting the girl on fire. Meanwhile, lurking in the background of this story, as it does in any proper Latin American novel, is a political component, in this case focusing on the tensions leading to the fascist overthrow of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s.

Interestingly, none of these themes figure prominently in “The Postman,” the big-screen adaptation of the book. The setting (and politics) was moved from Chile in the ‘70s to Italy in the early ‘50s, because the project was initiated by a popular Italian comedian, Massimo Troisi, who wanted to play the postman, and it so happens that Neruda was exiled to the Italian island of Capri during that period.

The adaptation itself was multilingual. Troisi had read the Italian translation of the Spanish-language book and pressed it on British director Michael Radford, who read the French version because it wasn’t available in England. Working from this edition, Radford collaborated with Troisi on an Italian screenplay, after rejecting a previous version Radford deemed “a piece of trash.” Starting anew, they incorporated Troisi’s languorous, ironic screen persona into the postman’s character, and the whole thing was sewn together by what Radford calls Troisi’s “amanuesis,” Anna Pavignano.

Because the time and place and mores were changed, as well as the postman’s age, out went a lot of the book’s obsessive eroticism. In its place is a more fragile, but no less charming, story of how Neruda’s poetry opens up the postman’s world, and what happens when the poet leaves him. This is something Radford could relate to. “I used to make documentaries,” he says. “One of the things that used to pain me about making them was you enter somebody’s life and then you depart. I wanted to make a film about a man who changes a guy’s life and what that entails.”

Which explains the most crucial change, a sequence in which the postman records the sounds of his island for the absent Neruda. In the book, he does it at Neruda’s behest, but in the movie he does it on his own initiative. “I think that one of the most powerful things in the movie is the realization that through the use of this tape recorder he somehow comes to an understanding of himself and his capacity, which I think is a wonderful metaphor for poetry in people’s lives,” Radford says.

It remains to be seen whether these sentiments will survive the publicity surrounding the making of this movie. Troisi went into it needing a heart transplant, and Radford was able to have him for only a few hours a day. Shortly after the film wrapped, he died. His funeral was attended by 10,000 people, and the movie went on to become a huge smash in Italy, surpassing “True Lies.”