The Chilean film-maker Pablo Larraín has a claim to being one of the most interesting (and prolific) directors now working. His film Jackie, a PTSD-moodscape study of Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination, mesmerised most who saw it, although I didn’t quite go under. Now he returns to Chile for this indulgent and rather fey reverie.

The leftist Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda (well played by Luis Gnecco) goes on the run when communism is outlawed in 1948 by President González Videla (a cameo by stalwart Larraín actor Alfredo Castro). But the film shows that, though Videla found it expedient to be seen chasing this troublesome communist, he did not want the embarrassment of actually catching and jailing an international celebrity. Larraín concocts a bumbling young police officer in charge of this politicised pseudo-chase, one Oscar Peluchonneau (fictional, but with a name apparently taken from a real-life Chilean police chief from the 1950s), played by Gael García Bernal.

There are jokey back-projections to the driving sequences, with Oscar at one stage confined to a Wallace and Gromit-type sidecar. Finally, poor Oscar becomes haunted by his quarry’s huge reputation, and the thought that whatever meaningful existence he has is due solely to this pursuit – and therefore that he is being “imagined” by the literary giant. The even-handedness of its imaginative sympathy reminded me a little of Larraín’s film No, about the Pinochet referendum. But there is something supercilious and arch about this fantasia, especially the stately and unconvincing boho-orgy scenes, in which Neruda romps with naked women, drinking wine and generally declaiming.