Cinema
Honourable
Clancy Sigal
The Duellists (Plaza 3: Classic Oxf°rd Street) There is a particularly chilling sound effect in The Duellists (A). It is the jagged scrape of a military sabre being drawn from its scabbard just before use in one of the several savage and futile duels—fought over a period of fifteen years — between tw° young Hussar officers of the same rank I° Napoleon's army. Harvey Keitel is a strut' ting gamecock for whom the military code of honour is both Sacred Writ and ati integral part of the socially revolutionnt,Yd mechanism that has enabled him, the stufn and resentful son of a Gascon blacksmith, t° he accepted among 'gentlemen' solely on account of his blunt battlefield courage. His adversary, Keith Carradine, is an aristocrat, "f good and easy manner, brave enough in a Pinch but no fanatic about bloodletting. These two young men have no real quarrel with each other — at least in Carradine's eyes. His bad luck is that he happened to be his general's courier who told Keitel he was to be disciplined for Skewering a civilian in the splendidly terrifying duel which opens this well-acted, raeticulously composed film. That duel, dramatically choreographed in an open field at dawn, also tells us everything about keitel's character: faced with a quivering, chickenhearted opponent, Keitel shows Min no mercy. A moment after running the Poor man through, he throws up his hands In disgust at how easy it was. Keitel feeds on his own spite and moronic pride, a deadly Performance.
Joseph Conrad's short story from which director Ridley Scott adapted his polished, °Pulent film can be read in several ways. As an ironic commentary on the macabre intertwining of two human destinies of almost polar opposites; as a biting jest about how sometimes an upwardly mobile Parvenu can embody a dying aristocracy's Mystique more fullbloodedly than its originators; or simply as a brutal psychological horror tale told. in this case, with tremendous style.
At its simplest The Duellists should unsettle anyone who has ever had a Paranoid bully pursuing him or her. While Watching it I was thrown back to a Childhood memory when almost two years 0, f my life were terrorised by a Chicago lanior-mafia nutcase named Angelo who loudly swore, on his sacred mother's honour, to 'kill' me because I'd kissed his gill at a party. Harvey Keitel is no Angelo — although he does carry himself with all the aturderous authority he showed as Robert iii Niro's friend in Mean Streets. Even after he has long forgotten why he wants to kill Carradine, his dull, persistent sense ol
revenge insists on repeatedly challenging the nobleman because 'Honour is every thing'. So, every few years, in various towns all over Napoleonic Europe. Carradine finds himself tapped on the shoulder by one Keitel's seconds. During most of the ensuing duels, which Carradine fights bravely but without enthusiasm, he gets the Worst of it. He survives, however, for the final, ambiguous encounter.
, The scriptwriter, Gerald Vaughan,rlughes, is hard put to know what to do °etween fights because someone has made
a decision to make this as pretty a picture as 13arry Lyndon and not to flesh out Conrad's fable with anything as vulgar as con
temporary comment. Almost no attempt is
roade to re-weave the story, so that perhaps vit e may better understand the relationship between ritualised barbarity and class or revolution. Lacking even a tenuously incis,ive point of view, the picture dwells Prilliantly on the set-piece duels, plus
superb location photography in France and Scotland (and the occasional, irrelevant insertion of actresses like Diana Quick and Gay Hamilton as camp-followers). Frank Tidy's photography is gorgeous, there's a nice oboe score, and the cameo appearances of Albert Finney and Robert Stephens are as welcome as they are unobtrusive.
I'm not sure I know what this film is saying about 'honour', On the surface, where most of The Duelists is so attractively played, there is a thin, conventional irony, enough to keep the vehicle going but not enough to rearrange our thoughts or emotions in any significant way. It's as if all the energy had gone into the visuals: the camera follows the elaborate preparations for each of the duels wilh all the loving detail of General Hospital before an operation. There is a kind of stateliness, a glamour even, to the slow drawing of the sword preparatory to plunging it into an opponent's breast, or the damping down (in closeup) of the ball-bullet in the pistol barrel before it is cocked. For all of its prodigious technical skill, The Duellists seems almost to be yearning for those foolish, primitive times when men were defined by something as sub-human as a face-to-face duel. In that sense it is a romantic, even a reactionary film.
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