Cannes 2025 | A Poet Review: Simón Mesa Soto’s Tragicomedy Centres Artists’ Stubbornness And Delusions

In Simón Mesa Soto’s A Poet, an unusual withered protagonist demands attention. Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) is a poet past his prime. He doesn’t ask for pity. Headstrong, stubborn to a fault, he exasperates in sticking to exemplar notions of a poet’s position that hasn’t reaped him well. Oscar takes glory in “suffering being the raw material” for his poetry, the melancholy that apparently feeds his art.

One of the film’s great triumphs is its willingness to push a wretched character like Oscar front and center. You could almost call him pathetic. That’s how the world looks at him, not so much with pity as frazzled familiarity with his self-destructive attitude. While obviously built around him, the film doesn’t abandon hope in him even as it presupposes an underlying impossibility in his fortune-reversal. The middle-aged Oscar hasn’t published a book in years. There’s only so much royalties can sustain, especially if it’s a poet whose early promise has mostly receded. He had won a prize in his twenties, which is dutifully brought up as his defining introduction at readings. Living with his old mother, he relies on her pension. He has all the bearings of someone washed-out, whom no one really likes to be around but tolerates out of mere courtesy. He himself knows it, but doesn’t work at changing for the glossier. To thrive, it seems, holds no appeal. He’s convinced in inflated opinions of himself, having little to no regard for conventionally celebrated art. He can’t even stand anyone raving about Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

It’s a complicated tonal dance and Soto nails it without stripping Oscar’s pained, inevitable tension with revival. Everyone has kind of given up on Oscar, except his mother and sister. The latter strains to get him a job, even as he resists and is determined to make the worst impression. However, his sister pulls some strings and finds him a teaching job. His first impulse is to evade.

Soto’s screenplay takes scathing jibes at the cultural expectation imposed on developing countries as Colombia, burdened under a first-world, circumscribing gaze. To make a mark, only a certain kind of narrative centered in narrow identitarian constructs is deemed worthy. Oscar is an outlier at the Poetry House, his publisher. He doesn’t feel at ease in ‘important’ circles, where poets and intellectuals rant about art’s potential for inclusion while being abundantly hypocritical. Other established, far more successful figures directly play the game. There’s the accomplished, well-known Efrain (Guillermo Cardona), who’s the epitome of everything Oscar is up against. Unhesitatingly, rather complacently, Efrain prods Oscar, pokes him with how well he has figured out landing a solid reception. Efrain is garlanded in cultural circles, having nabbed several awards as a major public figure. He has no qualms at all in how he’s got where he has.

It doesn’t take many interactions for Oscar to see through him entirely. Cardona gleefully revels in Efrain’s slimy insincerity. Not only is it too late for Oscar to play by culturally homogenizing rules, but he has no conviction in it. He’s too caught up in principles on poetry’s ideals, rather than bowing to what sells. When push comes to shove, Oscar does approach his publishing house, requesting his visibility be notched up. He’s especially propelled to do this after he tries reconnecting with his daughter from a broken-up marriage. You get glimpses of how distance and aversion crept up between him and his daughter, who in one of the film’s crushing scenes, tells him she just pities him. Despite her clear disinterest, he insists he wants to help out with her college admission fees. It’s a chance for him to prove himself as a responsible parent who no longer has his daughter’s faith, love or concern.

When a student’s poetry attracts his notice, Oscar finds a shot of purpose lighting up his life. Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) comes from a poor, big family cobbled together in a single room. Her father left her when she was a kid and has never been back. She’s neither ambitious nor hosts dreams of escape to expand her life, which Oscar nudges her to consider. All she wants is a simple, modest life with her family, though little space is there for her within its confines. Her grandmother warns Oscar that Yurlady is talented but lazy. Does she even want it? It’s a question that haunts the air between the mentor and mentee.

Yet he remains at it, urging her to dream bigger. However, as soon as he brings her to the Poetry House, his efforts at helping sharpen her singular voice get foiled. Efrain and others assert tailoring her poetry to what can sell, win prizes. As much as he tries to guard her from it, Efrain tells him he knows best how to streamline Yurlady’s talent, what channels to take her through. Simón Mesa Soto narrates these clashing relationships with a sense of flailing tragedy. Oscar invests heavily, emotionally in propping up Yurlady, who seems happier to slip away. Rios taps Oscar’s toggling between being a perennial drifter and slow steps at doing something just for art’s sake that lends his days meaning. A Poet delves into a jaded person with no belief in anyone and anything and flashes his buried scars in the light. Oscar might like you to think he has forfeited everything, but as Soto and Rios situate with deepening traces of realization, he still clutches onto something that shows promise. A Poet doesn’t hold back in showing how culture creates, rewards and punishes those trying to think themselves above it.

A Poet premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes Film Festival 2025.