In Neruda (2016), Delia, played by Mercedes Moran, is the second wife of main protagonist Pablo Neruda, played by Luis Gnecco. Throughout the film, Moran fulfills the role of a secondary minor character, whose main purpose is to drive the plot of the main character, Pablo. As Melanie Williams describes women in film in her essay “Entering the Paradise of Anomalies: Studying Female Character Acting in British Cinema”, “Their ability to imbue the slightest role with complexity or vigour is indeed admirable” (Williams para. 9). What this is to say is that despite the relatively simple role that women are often relegated to play, and especially so in films from older eras, Delia’s character space is able to serve as a launchpad for Pablo’s narrative. Throughout the film, we see Delia as a dutiful wife, supporting and enriching Pablo, as a perfect, traditional conception of femininity. Not only is this the role imbued with this notion of the supportive feminine archetype through narrative machinations, such as when Delia tells Peluchonneau that he is only a minor character created by Pablo Neruda himself to add to the dramatism of his repeated escapes, but also in Moran’s execution of the character. Moran’s subtle, gentle, graceful movements through the film, which can particularly be seen at the beginning of the film in the setting of Neruda’s home, lends itself to these traditional archetypes, and strengthens her character’s functionality as a support for Neruda’s storyline. Two specific scenes that comes to mind where this can be seen is when we see Delia draped over a chair with a book, wherein the cinematography exaggerates this perception, or when we see Delia embolden and comfort Neruda before he performs before a crowd at a costume party in his home.
Neruda (2016)
Melanie Williams, Entering the paradise of anomalies: studying female character acting in British cinema, Screen, Volume 52, Issue 1, Spring 2011, Pages 97–104, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjq064
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