After his Oscar-nominated Jackie, the director is taking on Nobel prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda. But what does his biographer make of the film’s freewheeling approach to the facts?

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood: all Pablo Larraín’s favourite films toy imaginatively with time. The director’s own much-praised 2016 drama, Jackie, is similarly non-linear. So it should come as no surprise that his new film about Pablo Neruda playfully and provocatively distorts the facts of an extraordinary year in the life of the Chilean Nobel prize-winning poet: Neruda is an anti-biopic.

The film is set in Santiago in 1948, at the outset of the cold war. The facts are these: already renowned for his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Neruda stood up in the senate (where he represented the Communist Party) and condemned Chile’s then-president, Gabriel González Videla,...