The Duellists

Harvey Keitel, of all people, plays a soldier in Napoleonic France who has on obsession with duels, and he keeps challenging fellow soldier Keith Carradine to a duel every time they meet over the course of 15 years.

This was director Ridley Scott's feature film debut, and he wanted to pay homage to the visual style of Barry Lyndon in the way he filmed this movie. Scott is visually very successful in that regard, showing he had a lot of potential that would come to fruition with Alien a few years later. The problem is that the story is a bit thin, having been based on a short story by Joseph Conrad. That, and Keitel (especially) and Carradine (somewhat less so) are miscast.

It's easy to see why critics would fawn over it. Normal people who can't comprehend why Sight and Sound critics would put material like Jeanne Dielmann at the top of their greatest films list might have a somewhat less positive view of The Duellists, although it's not as if it's bad by any stretch of the imagination.

I come to this after a week of heavily mulling over Nolan's Batman world and the failure of logical tools to explain beyond themselves. And here is a film about a deeply-seated illogical drive, and by one who inspired Nolan, by his own admission, and you can perhaps see that in the series of escalating encounters with a madness that trumps reason.

And the immersive world. Scott usually aims for this, and this is from a time he did it well. He takes from Kubrick the idea of natural light that, once the camera locks in, will look and move (and slightly breathe) like a Romantic painting. The era is Napoleon's, and at least the wintry march back from Russian defeat provides opportunity for some astonishing images.

Some words exhaust their meaning, when thrown without care; so it's not enough to call this existentialist. The story is that an army officer bears an inexplicable grudge that spans 20 years and half of Europe.

Everything you need to know is in the last scene, expertly executed. The idea is that something deeply not-logical gnaws and eats at man's soul and sniffs for blood. And that men, this is strictly male, have lived with this aspect of self for so long, we have developed separate not-logical tools that allow us to not only instinctively respond to the call, however reluctantly, and in spite of recognition of how insane it is, but to silently respect and defend it as its own kind of logic (in our case, the concept of honor).

In the last scene, we have two men seeking each the other to eliminate him from existence, as simple as that. It's the oldest game men have played, and the same thrill resurfaces across poker tables and football. It's got to have something of death in it, if it is to matter at all.

And I have a book called Bushido: The Soul of Japan here with me, retrieved from a shelf because the film sparked an interest, that explains how the blade is the samurai's extension of soul and imbued with the same discipline.

The two rivals have fenced for the entire film, but settle on pistols for the deciding duel, and wander about in a forest, two shots each, meaning they will be able to instantly discharge what is in their soul.

Each man in the shot he takes reveals who they are, one of them rash and impertinent, and fires first, they other level-headed and reserved. The subtle context of the scene is that politics do decide war from afar, in our case the slippery (faulty) pair of boots of the aristocratic boot-maker.

Which is, in a third level, a beautiful way of putting the subtle discord strummed by the universe that creates a slippery world and illogical selves of us, dumb chance as fate.

And suffice to say, the film is British, so you will not learn it here, but in spite of the probably British-started legend, the French are historically the best tactical warriors in Europe. There is a reason why nearly every word in the modern lexicon of war is originally French, and that includes honour.

This /is/ one of the best sword-fighting movies ever made, in that the choreography doesn't look like choreography. In the fight sequences, there's that rare sense of reticence, chance, uncertainty: of men thinking while they fight and trying to stay alive (The battle scenes in Kurosawa seem to me to share the same quality).

What sets this film apart (beyond its sheer visual gorgeousness) is its unremitting humanity and realism. Carradine as the protagonist is a decent enough, reasonable enough chap trying to live by an unreasonable and inflexible code. Keitel as Feraud is a cipher: charged with a wholly unreasonable hate the sources of which we never see. The movie steps through the ups and downs of war, fashion, politics. Though the film's structured around a series of violent combats, the struggle is finally a moral one. One man finally transcends the ideal of honor that's kept him a prisoner for fifteen years. The other is unable to.

This is a movie to watch, and to recommend to one's friends. It's lamentably not available yet in DVD, but can be found occasionally as a rental. Watch it for the costumes, the lighting, and the gorgeous camerawork. Watch it again for a movie that takes on The Big Issues. Brilliant.

Maybe I just don't get around much. Perhaps I just need to expand my universe. Whatever the case, I am convinced that The Duellists is the best film I have ever taken the time to watch. I felt the fear, I felt the cold, this movie just plain made me feel. Great acting and great filming, great haunting soundtrack, probably reasons why I have watched this movie half a dozen times. Have not found many folks that share my enthusiasm for this film. Perhaps I have 20/20 vision, and everyone else has cataracts.

After making a string of acclaimed adverts, Ridley Scott followed fellow ad man Alan Parker onto the big screen with his debut movie.

The Duellists was based on a tale by Joseph Conrad (who inspired Apocalypse Now and the ship names for his 1979 feature, Alien - Nostromo and Narcissus).

As you my expect from Ridley, every scene looks gorgeous and is obviously the mark of a man moving from 30 second promotional films into the big screen world.

Harvey Keitel (later to star in Thelma and Louise) and Keith Carradine are the Hollywood stars acting alongside a wealth of British thesps including Albert Finney, Diana Quick, Tom Conti, Pete Postlethwaite and Veronica Quilligan (later to play the innocent protagonist of Neil Jordan's Angel).

The movie is clearly inspired by Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and Barry Lyndon and looks like a dry run for Gladiator's battle scenes.

It deals with the themes of honor, obsession and violence. Needless to say, the futility of war and the destructive nature of revenge leads to the twist that both men have been duelling for so long, in the end they actually forget what it was that set them off on their feud.

The duels are stunning, the attention to detail is meticulous and the movie won a string of awards, including 'Best Debut Film' at the 1977 Cannes film festival.

Top trivia

* The budget was so tight that Scott was forced to use producer David Puttnam and other crew members as extras.

This was an extension of his earlier short films, a potted version of Paths of Glory in which a handful of extras (including Tony Scott) go over the wire and run round the camera before repeating the exercise. Smoke and editing hide the fact that there were so few people involved.

*The Duel, as it was originally called, was to be made for French TV as a one-hour film.

*The scene where the French army is bogged down was shot in a ski resort near Inverness.

*After EMI turned down the script, Scott flew the project to Chicago and the company Hallmark...

*After the French deal collapsed and the $700,000 budget proved too rich for Hallmark's blood, one of the bosses saw its potential as a film and suggested that Scott try and make it as a movie.

*The eventual budget was a mere $900,000. Scott clinched the dealing by telling Paramount he would put up a completion bond and that he would start pre-production on the day of the meeting. He would start shooting within a couple of months.

The thought of filming a movie like that in September left the suits slack of jaw.

In the sun-kissed world of la la land, making a Joseph Conrad movie in Winter sounded like a nightmare.

*Scott had originally wanted to make a Western but lacked the cash to fly off to Monument Valley and the locations of other such classic John Ford Westerns.