The Duke continues English tradition of the taped theatrical plays with the elements of a movie. Jim Broadbent is wonderful but the understated performance of Helen Mirren with hardly a hundred words throughout the whole movie supports her position as a Queen of an English cinema.
Neruda is a national poet of Chile. I thought Chileans were antipodes of Argentineans: stern, ordered, Germanic-influenced Catholics. Instead the movie demonstrates the underside of Santiago's 1940s urban life as a typical Latino stereotype: hard drinking and heavily womanizing men, including Senator Neruda. Married Neruda escapes his hiding to visit a brothel and hires three girls who swill champagne with him. His half-imaginary, half-real nemesis, police inspector Pelluchonneau is himself a son of a whore by the legendary Minister of the Interior. Neruda's life is saved in the end not by his Communist friends whom he alternately admires and mistreats -- like his much suffering wife -- but by millionaire Araucanian landowner out of spite to the state. Because it is a movie made by a Latin American directors, the leftists are shown sympathetically.
