The Duellists

Men, eh?

And French men in particular.

Obviously, it’s not a pleasant thing to be grabbed by the vernaculars on the orders of one’s General – but to metaphorically shoot the messenger does not really become a Gentleman – especially one with military pretensions.  And yet the two protagonists in this film are at soon it like knives – well, swords, actually.

Gabriel Feraud (played by Harvey Keitel) is a point-happy pleb, basically, with delusions of grandeur.  Part of this grandeur is in the settlement of disputes with tongues of sharp steel – epees or sabres, what you will – complete with a code of so-called honour which equates to idiocy.  Armand d’Hubert (Keith Carradine), however, is of aristocratic stock, yet serving – like Feraud – in the legions of post-Revolutionary Napoleonic army.  D’Hubert is not so keen on the duels, even if he is the better of the two, but once he is forced into the first, fin-de-siecle encounter, honour becomes the carrot and the label of cowardice the stick that binds him into the to-the-death cycle of the other’s origin-obscure hatred.

The film (and Conrad’s original short-story) are based on real events; although in the film, the action takes place over a mere fifteen years, the true story took double the time to resolve, both participants into their dotage before satisfaction.  However, perhaps a trail of thirty years would have been too long for a film with a limited budget and an audience to appease – and so fifteen is a happy medium.  Especially given that we are given swift passage through years of relative peace between encounters.  There is, it must be said, something interminably dull in the clang of sabres if that is all we have to endure – and dull indeed would be the film so decorated.  But we are treated to the rising fortunes of the aristocrat, who rises through the ranks from Captain to Major and finally, General where, ensconced with his sister, he is introduced to an aristocratic neighbour whose daughter the sister thinks is suitable and, in a final confrontation with a persistent Feraud, he lays to rest the ghost that has haunted him this decade and a half – not killing, but allowing the ignominy of shameful living to that spectre.

I see many slushy, sick-making films being churned out by the Hollywood bubble-gum machine.  Films that star the likes of Jennifer Anniston and Brad Pitt-bull and their air-headed chums, which nevertheless make their producers and stars millions upon millions because, well, that’s the sort of thing the great unwashed cinema-goer likes to see.  And because they are the sort of thing designed to appeal to the largest section of society, they attract big budgets in the certain knowledge that they will gross a big fat profit for the investors.  The Duellists, however, was a film made by an inexperienced producer of commercials who is candid about learning on the hoof; he was only able to raise just short of a million dollars, and even then on the proviso that Keitel and Carradine were cast as the protagonists (in the stead of Oliver Reed and Michael York).  Schedules were tight and, given that Scott was a security for the film – in that, if he went over-budget, it would have to come from his pocket – many ingenious devices were employed and corners cut.  And yet the film is a Cannes-winning work of high art which, nevertheless, failed to make back at the box office the money which had been invested in it, because the distributors were at a loss as to how to sell it.

It deserves to be seen and appreciated.