Il Postino (The Postman)

Poetry, politics, and perspective

I recently rewatched the film Il Postino (The Postman), directed by Michael Radford, with my wife. It was the first time I had seen it since high school, and somewhere in the first half-hour, she realized that she had also seen it in school. I don’t know how a film of such quality managed to make it into the public-school curriculum, but whatever daemon got it placed there was certainly a benevolent one; I saw no better or more memorable film in any high school (or for that matter college) class that I can recall. The story is a simple one: a melancholy fisherman’s son on a remote Italian island takes a job as a bicycle postman and is informed that he is to service but one house, inhabited by the exiled poet and “man of the people” Pablo Neruda. Mario, as the Italian is called, shyly begins to address the poet, and a friendship blossoms that will awaken Mario’s poetic and political consciousness and, of course, lead him to employ both his own and Neruda’s poetry in one of its most time-honored purposes: seduction—or courtship, as the result makes it.