“I start out as an outsider, usually photographing other outsiders, and then at some point I step over a line and become an insider,” wrote American photographer Bruce Davidson. “I don’t do detached observation.” A large number of the images in Another Kind of Life were taken by photographers who took care to befriend their subjects.

The opening shot sets the tone for what follows: a pair of duelling cockroaches attached to a string, tormented by a bored child. In 1953’s The Wages of Fear, we quickly sense that Henri-Georges Clouzot’s characters are similarly powerless. His multi-national misfits, marooned in an unnamed South American town, are effectively prisoners, scrabbling around for the money with which to escape a place which is “like a prison: easy to get in, impossible to get out”. The film’s exposition is overlong, but creates a sense of oppressive dread.

As with Hitchcock’s The Birds, the leisurely first act means that the ensuing shocks hit home that much harder, the set-up (taken from a novel by George Arnaud) being that a serious fire at an American-owned oil well can only be extinguished with the aid of two truckloads of volatile nitro-glycerin. The Americans realise that they’ve a ready supply of willing recruits to drive them, the depot manager stating bluntly that “these bums don’t have any union – they’ll work for peanuts.” Drive too quickly and the consignment will detonate, and the four bums chosen have just a 50/50 chance of success.

Yves Montand’s strutting Mario and Charles Varnel’s sly hard man Jo drive the first truck, followed by Peter van Eyck and Folco Lulli as Bimba and Luigi. What ensues is unbearably tense: who’d have imagined that a pair of slow-moving lorries could instil so much terror? Predictably, this isn’t an easy ride: bumpy roads, rock falls, and a pool filled with crude oil all play significant parts. The famous sequence where the trucks reverse onto a shaky wooden platform remains uniquely terrifying.

As the tension rises, the pressure tells on the protagonists. Mario’s apparent bravery tips over into brutal thuggery and the cocky Jo turns into a snivelling wretch, though one undeserving of the fate which later befalls him. Clouzot’s bleak vision still looks and sounds unerringly modern: Armand Thiraud’s gleaming monochrome cinematography and Georges Auric’s minimal score haven’t dated at all. And the film’s nihilistic close remains a shocker.

This BFI reissue gives us The Wages of Fear uncut in a new 4K restoration, and comes with generous bonus features. Adrian Martin’s commentary is insightful, and there’s a long audio-only interview in English with Yves Montand: recorded in 1989, the star discussing his distinguished career. The best extras include an account of Clouzot’s chequered career and a revealing interview recorded in 2005 with Clouzot’s hard-working assistant director, Michel Romanoff. We learn that the film was actually shot in the Camargue region of south-west France, and that the huge boulder which blocks the road at one point took the crew several weeks to actually push into position. There’s an excellent booklet too, including contemporary responses by director Karel Reisz and critic Penelope Houston.

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Overleaf: watch the 1953 trailer for The Wages of Fear

There is a South American theme to Rambert’s latest triple bill, two new commissions made to chime with an oldie but goldie, the rhythms of Latin social dances linking all three.

It’s a close, steamy evening in Panama City. A short walk out of the Casco Viejo, or old quarter, leads to the coastal belt – a rush of highway with an accompanying, exhaust-flogged pedestrian walkway that hugs the Bay of Panama. It’s an inauspicious route, too close to traffic and the pungent smells of the city’s fish market, but I’m drawn towards the far-off sounds of an unlikely cinema congregation.

Chilean director Pablo Larrain has described Neruda as a “false biopic”, and it’s a film that surprises on many levels in its presentation of Pablo Neruda, the great poet who is his country’s best-known cultural figure. It captivates for the scope of its invention, its ludic combination of reality and artifice, poetry and politics, as well as the contradictions of its central character.

Larrain's last film Jackie was also a biopic with a difference, but Neruda goes further in every sense. It’s also something of a departure from the director’s earlier works, such as No and Post Mortem, which were grounded in the very real context of Chile in the Pinochet years, or The Club, which showed how the inheritance of that totalitarian world endured after its actual circumstances had ended. Set in 1948, Neruda works as a prologue to that era: it was then that Chilean president Gabriel González Videla, who had come to power with a leftist agenda, realigned his loyalties away from Communism in a “sell-out to the empire of the North”.

This symbiotic relationship works very much in one direction 

As well as his renown as a writer, Pablo Neruda was a Senator from the Communist Party, and his denouncement of Videla for this political change of tack made him an immediate enemy of the authorities. We first encounter him in the corridors of power, specifically an anteroom in the Senate that bizarrely seems to function as a combination of common room, urinal and bar (imbibing is plentiful throughout the film). That presents him as statesman, and though the epithet of “the most important communist in the world” may be an exaggeration, the poet’s international reputation, backed by Europe intellectuals including that other great Pablo, Picasso – who makes cameo appearances – gave him real importance in his world.  

The next time we meet him is in a very different conext, at an almost bacchanalian party at the poet’s home, clearly a point of congregation for Chile’s own intelligentsia as well as off-duty public figures. The atmosphere is part fancy-dress fiesta – Neruda costumes himself as Lawrence of Arabia – part cultural salon, presided over by the poet and his wife Delia (Mercedes Morán, pictured below), the Argentine aristocrat whose acceptance of her husband’s philandering was only part of the unwavering support that she gave him. The contrast is highlighted when a Party delegation arrives to warn that he must go into hiding. In the portrayal of Luis Gnecco, an actor with a pedigree in comedy, the poet is a corpulent voluptuary, most unlike more typical revolutionary heroes; although he obviously does not "know what it is to sleep on the floor”, his writings and personality nevertheless inspire real devotion among Chileans.

In a nicely satirical scene, Neruda finds that his connections within the old Chilean aristocracy (which still really runs the country) are of no avail, while his attempt to flee abroad is halted at the border. At which point the film's “wild hunt” sets in. With the poet on the run, his pursuer becomes police inspector Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal, playing with nicely stylised verve), whom we have already encountered in voiceover. The communists may have initially debated whether the poet might be more valuable as a prisoner – we get a glimpse of what his fate in captivity would have been in a desert detention camp under the command of Augusto Pinochet, the nation’s future dictator – but now Party minders will be hurrying him and Delia from one safe house to another. Such furtiveness is alien to Neruda, who can’t resist reappearing at his old haunts, albeit often in disguise.

The trimly moustached Peluchonneau (pictured below) is a creature of fiction in every sense. In his own version he’s the illegitimate son of the founder of the Chilean police force and a prostitute, but actually his identity seems to develop as a product of Neruda's fantasy. The poet certainly seems to be in command of the pursuit, leaving a series of cheap detective stories – one of the writer’s fascinations – behind at each step of the chase (Larrain adds rear projections in Peluchonneau's car scenes, highlighting the detectve tropes). The ultimate indignity he feels is the suspicion that without his target he himself is literally nothing: Neruda may refer to him as “my phantom in uniform”, but it is clear that he is the one writing the script. This symbiotic relationship – “I dream of him, he dreams of me” – works in one direction.

There is rich comedy in the process, as at each stage the hapless Peluchonneau arrives too late, or is defeated by disguises (there's a very funny scene set in a transvestite brothel). His interception of Neruda’s first wife Maria, and attempts to involve her in the process, are brought to a hilariously bathetic conclusion, while his encounter with Delia, no longer following her husband in his escape, provides one of the film's most telling scenes.

The pursuit becomes increasingly frantic, culminating in a dramatic ascent into the snows of the Andean mountains. Those last scenes are beautifully filmed by Larraine’s long-term cinematographer Sergio Armstrong, who also catches the darker period cityscapes of Santiago and the bright colours of Neruda’s festivities – both imagined and not, they have a visual flare that Fellini would surely have relished – with distinction. Federico Jusid contributes a grandiose musical score that feels like a presence in its own right.

“I chased the eagle, but I didn’t know how to fly,” Peluchonneau admits poignantly towards the end. We know from history that Neruda will escape, and flourish in emigration: his pursuer faces the cold end of irrelevance. It's a wry conclusion to a wry film, one which in its playful self-referencing sometimes recalls the work of Peter Greenaway. Larrain may not have set out to "catch" his subject in any predictable way, but his film is certainly imbued with the poet's spirit.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Neruda