A Poet Review: Portrait of a Has-Been Artist

Middle-aged and unemployed, Oscar Restrepo (Ubeimar Rios) is still clinging to the minor success of two slim volumes of poetry he published in his 20s. Despite saying wincing things out loud like “suffering has been the raw material of my poetry,” Oscar is no misunderstood genius. He’s not even misunderstood: His siblings rightly identify him as a drunk, a mooch on their elderly mom, and a guy fixated on playing the victim. Oscar may suffer for his art, but he’s also, frankly, pretty insufferable. 

At least, at first. Colombian writer-director Simón Mesa Soto (Amparo) devotes the first half hour to establishing Oscar’s baseline – a slurry of hapless and aggrieved – to better understand the ways Oscar can, and cannot, evolve from that essential self once he begins to mentor a promising teen poet named Yurlady (Rebeca Andrade) and reconnect with his own estranged daughter Daniela (Allison Correa). Oscar’s encouragement of Yurlady’s writing isn’t entirely altruistic; spying her talent, he sees her as a way to have his own position elevated at the local poetry center, which at best tolerates Oscar. But we come to see his heart really is in the right place, especially as he begins to understand that the center’s bourgeois muckety-mucks are exploiting Yurlady, fetishizing her working class background and using her as a prop to secure funding. 

Mesa Soto initially mines wry humor from Oscar’s sad-sackness; he and editor Ricardo Saravia are especially good at scene transitions that land like a punchline, and the marvelous Rios – small of stature and existentially slumped – cuts a comical figure. But the film, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes last year, subtly evolves (more successfully than Oscar, it turns out) to find just as much to scorn in the poetry center elites, and to nudge the viewer toward a more compassionate approach to its luckless sorta-hero. 

Well, until Oscar undoes all that goodwill again, and we see the full scope of Mesa Soto’s canvas: The titular poet may be at the center, but it is the two young women in his life who most hold your focus. Over the course of four parts (in a gently overlong film), we witness the ways Oscar fails Yurlady and Daniela. You’ll blush for Oscar, watching the shambling dad ask his teen daughter if he can borrow five bucks, and burn when he leaves Daniela in a vulnerable position. But perhaps more significantly, we witness Yurlady and Daniela evolve – testing and setting boundaries, figuring out who they are and what they want out of life, even, or especially, when adults disappoint them. Amidst so many dark clouds, they’re this tragicomedy’s silver lining.

A Poet

2025, NR, 123 min. Directed by Simón Mesa Soto. Starring Ubeimar Rios, Rebeca Andrade, Guillermo Cardona, Allison Correa, Margarita Soto, Humberto Restrepro.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

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