The 1977 film "The Duellists" is an adaptation of a Joseph Conrad story, "The Duel," by a young English director whose previous experience had up until that point been episodic television drama and commercials, most notably the idyllic television campaign for Hovis. I saw this film when I was very young - my father being a huge fan of this film for reasons he never fully explained to me. As a child I had already been seduced by the bubblegum charms of what is now ponderously known as "Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope", and by then my father had introduced me to the magnificence of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather" and "Apocalypse Now" which, truth be told, were somewhat lost on me at that age. But for me, as a formative filmmaker, it was "The Duellists" that struck me as something new and remarkable.
The cinematography is without question the most compelling aspect of Scott's production, with Frank Tidy's work creating a rich canvas upon which Scott paints this period narrative. Scott's use of long takes, using the grandeur of the natural landscape as the epic backdrop for the unfolding human drama, is impeccable. And the attention to detail and texture is both precise and hypnotic - a truly visually arresting spectacle. As Vincent Canby in the New York Times described, Scott's haunting imagery is "a memory of almost indescribable beauty, of landscapes at dawn, of over-crowded, murky interiors, of underlit hallways and brilliantly sunlit gardens." But more than this, what strikes me now is the gentle hand Scott uses with the story, a quality too often missing in contemporary cinema.
Like many in his generation Scott exhibits the influence of Stanley Kubrick's film making style - not only the extraordinary attention to detail, but also the deliberate pacing and the palpable sense of place and time. Here we see a reinterpretation of Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon," embellished as it is for a more commercial audience. But where Kubrick used modernist techniques to create distance between subject and audience, Scott applies a different approach.
What truly brings this film home to me, now as it did when I first saw it, are the moments of naked, unstructured performance - the wild card in this otherwise carefully cultivated film world: The moment at the start of an early duel when D'Hubert (Keith Carradine) interrupts the fight to sneeze, or the awkward naturalism of D'Hubert's proposal of marriage while being distracted by a horse determined to win his attention - all these moments temper the grand epic canvas with a human naturalism that is beguiling and disarming. For a boy brought up on bombastic cinema served up on a bed of hyperbole, to me this small, delicately crafted film was an exhilarating breath of fresh air.
This is not a perfect film, though. The greatest flaw, perhaps, is the unfortunate casting of Keith Carradine in the lead role. A perfectly competent actor as he is, Carradine lacks the weight to balance Keitel's deliciously ludicrous and vain Feraud. Carradine never quite blends with his surroundings This has the unintended side-effect of submerging Keitel's Feraud into the background, making him seem more at home in this world than D'Hubert, and as a consequence he appears more reasonable than he should. It is D'Hubert, rather than Feraud, who seems absurd to the audience, even if only unconsciously.
That said, the film is a remarkable achievement. Everything here serves the story - the images, pacing and score. A Kubrick film for the masses perhaps. Scott would go on to use his affection for Kubrick's meticulous detail, as well as a handling of naturalistic performance, to staggering effect in his next feature "Alien." But it began here, in Scott's marriage of classic cinematic splendor with moments of simple, frail and flawed human reality.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment