Dawn Madness

By John Skow

THE DUELLISTS

Directed by Ridley Scott Screenplay by Gerald Vaughan-Hughes

Dawn: a hayfield spreads to a stand of poplars; early sun warms the rough wall of a stone granary; in the middle distance, two small groups of men.

We understand immediately. Several hundred films have used ground fog rising off fields and the dark figures of waiting men to give the same contrast between soft landscape and hard purpose. A duel is to be fought. The swordplayers level rapiers, hold, touch blades in saute, fight. One falls, too badly wounded to continue.

Duels at dawn are as familiar as graveside scenes in the rain, and the news that The Duellists is a visually opulent costume drama set in France at the time of he Napoleonic Wars does not make the heart leap up.

A very artless artist can sometimes achieve freshness simply by not realizing that his material is stale. A very strong-minded one can, on a good day, banish cliches from an overused subject by sheer force of will. Ridley Scott, an English television director who had not done a full-length movie before The Duellists, clearly is strong-minded, and his film does not contain a stale moment.

Scott and the screenwriter, Gerald Vaughan-Hughes, hold closely to a short story by Joseph Conrad called The Duel. Conrad was fascinated by obsession, by the kind of craziness carried so far beyond the reasonable delusions of ordinary men that it acquires a kind of grandeur. In The Duellists a young hussar lieutenant named D'Hubert (Keith Carradine), an unexceptional man, collides with another lieutenant named Feraud (Harvey Keitel). Feraud is a strutting, bloody-minded fool, and he challenges D'Hubert to a duel. Though D'Hubert knows that the matter is silly, honor forces him to fight. Feraud is wounded, though not severely, and the affair seems to be well ended.

Not so. Feraud has the mentality of a yapping farm dog, and when his wound has healed he forces another duel. And another. There is peace between the two men only in time of war ("Duels between nations take absolute precedence," one of D'Hubert's brother officers says cynically). Feraud remains crazed with hatred, and D'Hubert, though he cannot remember the original cause of the quarrel and is quite willing to forget the feud, continues to dance to honor's tune and his adversary's whim.

Though Feraud's mania never subsides, and though D'Hubert thinks him contemptible, the two are bound together in something that is almost comradeship. The mad intensity of their relationship burns away what in another film would be the excess of landscapes too beautifully framed and interiors too cunningly photographed. The Duellists uses the beauty of the French landscape to comment gently on the frenzy of the men bloodying themselves in its soft fields. In the end, after a resolution of sorts has been achieved between the two men, Feraud stands, back to the camera, looking out at a splendid river valley. The last duel has been fought. The scene is one of peace.

The last bit of rancid emotion should have been drained away. But this is a Conrad tale, and obsession rules. The rigid set of Feraud's shoulders tells the absurd, almost admirable truth: he is just as mad as ever.

--John Skow

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