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The Duellists (1977)

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Ridley Scott’s first film The Duellists is a deep dive into the dueling subculture prominent in the French military of the early 1800s.  It’s almost entirely about two guys: Armand (Keith Carradine) is pretty ambivalent about the whole dueling thing but continues to participate because it’s more or less the thing you did back then. Carradine brings a really nice laid back vibe to proceedings, complete with California accent and something of a light Wiley Wiggins vibe.  The other guy, Gabriel (Harvey Keitel) brings a heavy Harvey Keitel vibe and Brooklyn accent, which gives the film a real nice “East coast vs. West coast” feel. There’s lots of great early 1800s fashion, a fact underlined when the sparse narration refers to “the passing of 5 years and a change in military fashion,” after which cute braids are replaced by large hats.  Which is to say, the film is both very concerned with period trappings and not taking itself too seriously.

After the initial duel is kicked off, we follow both men through the years as Gabriel continually looks for new opportunities to get into duels with Armand.  According to military rules they can only duel when they aren’t actually actively at war, and are the same rank. This leads to a beautiful recurring gag: we see Armand at ease, learn his rank, see him have a conversation where someone mentions that Gabriel was recently promoted to the same rank, see Armand find out Gabriel’s in town, and then see him get roped into a duel.  And the duels are great, escalating in weaponry and danger, and full of good duel jokes, a style of humor I was barely aware of before this film, but of which I now crave more.

In between the many duels are portraits of the life of a French soldier in the early 1800s, snapshots which run the gamut from having a pipe with your buds, talking about how cool it is that you’re going to war (so you don’t have to fight a duel with Gabriel), to freezing to death in Russia.  There’s a kind of underlying madness to all of them, which helps make Armand’s obligation to keep dueling even though he’s just not that into it plausible. This is a world where there are rules to be followed that are designed to stave off the world’s brutality and chaos, even if those same aspects are the byproducts of the rules themselves. This is perfectly illustrated in a moment where Gabriel is told to walk west at the beginning of a duel and he quickly scans the sky just to make sure he knows exactly where due west is before heading out, neatly saying everything the film is telling you about its “rules over life” mentality in a wordless moment.

In terms of films about two dudes, one who can’t get enough of dueling the other, and another who is just not that into it anymore, The Duellists delivers big time.  It’s got a pretty strong “one or no duels is probably enough” message which we could all use, but more importantly it’s a super funny weird-ass period piece that features Harvey Keitel wearing cute braids.  Great film for those of you consumed with vengeance or deeply exasperated by the people seeking it.

Sometimes someone makes something that too closely and uncritically borrows or even openly steals from someone else’s idea. This is “bad” in two ways – it’s bad for the original, which the derivative cheapens thru lesser repetition, and it’s bad for the derivative, because strongly-foregrounded influence obscures whatever unique material might actually be hiding in there. Ridley Scott has made 25 movies, but his first one here is stone-cold Barry Lyndon (1975) worship straight off the rip. Made just two years before, that movie’s influence is absolutely present and unsynthesized here, in a manner that in painting, comics, or fiction, would read as hackish and embarrassing in the worst and most obvious way.

I happily found the results much more complicated here. Barry Lyndon is an optically mind-blowing but dramatically unconcerned piece of source material, and Ridley Scott is a decent stylist who tries to make popular movies with oomf and pizazz. So on one hand, The Duellists is super interesting and strange when viewed with its relationship to its inspiration directly in mind: The zoom-outs, the narrator, the Nora Brady appearance, the occurrence of the word “chevalier,” the lighting, cinematography, and even character voicing are all at least a full grade below, but the sum it manages is “bizarro remix,” not “wack bite;” it’s definitely “in conversation,” an uncanny illumination of what sets Barry Lyndon apart from pretty much everything. And on the other hand, The Duellists is a period story with oomf and pizazz that’s fun and funny and not like Barry Lyndon at all.

In that movie, we have an absolutely opaque Harvey Keitel (inexplicably in full Brooklyn mode, though in Napoleon’s army in the late 18th/early 19th century) picking a fight with Keith Carradine over some bullshit, and insisting on resolving it with a duel. The duel keeps getting interrupted and punted to a later date because one or the other guy keeps getting too injured to continue dueling, but without dying completely enough for the fight to be resolved. Carradine understandably gets super bummed every time Keitel pops back up to finish the engagement, and man does he keep popping back up over the course of changing circumstance and rank. The duel goes on for 16 years. No lessons are learned and nothing changes.

My favorite part was how nice the the sword-fighting felt. The sabres have a danger and weight that feels unusually rare, to the point of making me feel alert to how choreographed and risk-free sword-fighting usually looks on screen. There’s a part where a chunk of Carradine’s shoulder is hanging off, and another part where he nervously sneezes; both great. There’s also a gruesome “winter hellzone Russia death march” scene that’s got a Dreams (1990) / Marketa Lazarova (1967) vibe, with everyone staggering around wrapped in burlap and clutching themselves, which I always love to see.

I tried to get a better, non-Lyndon-oriented feel for this one on a by watching Black Rain (1989), Scott’s “Michael Douglas as a complete asshole NYC bad-boy cop in Osaka” movie (extremely bad), and The Duchess (2008), an unrelated 18th century peerage movie with an emphasis on gorgeous wigs where Kiera Knightley gets into a bad marriage with Ralph Fiennes (who I love and am probably about to watch in Wuthering Heights (1992)) (not bad but not great). But I’m already over word count here so I’ll abruptly conclude with the basic verdict that The Duellists is a relatively very good period movie (though it’s not the best one as much as it tries), as well as a relatively very good Ridley Scott movie, and that I would like to see a supercut of all period drama scenes where “a carriage rolls up to a manor house, and someone gets out of it while the servants watch expectantly.”

Vanity Fair (2004)

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In Vanity Fair (2004), Reese Witherspoon plays Becky Sharp, who seems to have trained her whole life to become an expert at all things classy and charming. In quick succession she gets out of her French teaching/culture-making job, marries a soldier, and sets to work climbing the social ladder.  Eventually she makes the grave mistake of performing a Bollywood number, driving Gabriel Byrne so wild with passion that he tries to rape her, which her husband witnesses. Then he initiates a divorce and dies offscreen in India. “The colonization of India” itself is a backdrop the film delicately comments on by inserting prodigious tabla playing whenever someone mentions “India.” (A comment on this below.) Some other stuff happens but I found it hard to pin down exactly what. Vanity Fair strikes me as a movie made by someone entirely too familiar with the source material, hitting all the big beats but missing the logistical portions needed to make it comprehensible.

Almost everyone in the film is part of an undifferentiated costumed blob, so I devised a visual shorthand to help distinguish characters, using sideburn style or “being Bob Hoskins” for the men, and age or “are they Reese Witherspoon” for the women. This imperfect system caused some issues, such as in a scene where a corpse was shown with sideburns obscured.  The corpse turned out to be an important character, which I found out because someone in the movie mentioned the death later. I felt that the film frequently either killed or married an important character offscreen, then later had a character talk about it. Too polite and well-mannered to show what actually happens in the story? Relaying important plot points through subtle social cues and gossip? These methods destroy Becky for twelve years, after which she’s whisked off to India (tabla sounds!), and they destroy the movie for probably forever.

Although overall Vanity Fair is confusing and bad, there are some nice things. There’s a good scene where some guy goes to India, gets dusty and hunky, and becomes a martial arts badass; this development is never referred to again. There’s also a long sequence where Becky refuses to sell someone a horse, then trades someone else the horse for a ride in a carriage, then refuses the carriage ride. Everyone talks in a pseudo accent (from my notes: “British Accent?”). There’s also a part where not-with-child Becky becomes eight-months-pregnant Becky right in the middle of a scene (possible causes of swift pregnancy: ballroom dancing; note she placed in bodice; war breaking out with the Dutch).     

With its commitments to razzle dazzle and fast and loose storytelling it can sometimes feel as though Vanity Fair was striving to become a Transformers for the powdered wig crowd.  Although it does have plenty of “robots with lips” moments, it lacks the wit, social graces, and Machiavellian maneuvering it takes to become a truly unstoppable Victorian franchise. Perhaps it’ll be worth watching once Hollywood is done with superheroes and moves on to a period pieces phase – if only to prepare for the sequel “BECKY SHARP V. MARIE ANTOINETTE.” Until then I would urge period piece fans and innocent bystanders alike to steer clear.

I wanted to watch this because it’s a Thackeray adaptation with a Julian Fellowes screenplay; Fellowes wrote Gosford Park (2001) & Downton Abbey (2010-2015), and other Thackeray adaptations I like include Barry Lyndon (1975), so I thought this might be a valid double feature with the new Yorgos Lanthimos period piece, The Favourite (2018). (I swear not every post is gonna be abt Barry Lyndon.) But compared to Gosford Park (which rules) or The Favourite (which I liked a lot), Vanity Fair feels small.

There’s no denying the architecture, but Reese Witherspoon’sstyling and much of the overall production design looks plastic, even kinda 90s. Except in brief establishing shots there’re hardly any expansive views of anything or moments without speech; most scenes are dialogue presented in cuts between talking heads, shot head-on above the waist. Crowd scenes focus on one character, while unleashed extras scamper in the background with “unintelligible crowd shouting” copiously overdubbed. Scenes with any blocking or any physicality to them at all are awkward; in one, James Purefoy even “lounges on a settee” in a way that manages to make it look like he hasn’t figured out what “sitting down” should properly consist of.

I realized the “period movies” journey Barry Lyndon sent me on has been the wrong pursuit; what I’m looking for is another movie world that’s at least that lush, not just another good movie set in the 19th century. Still, it’s confounding that the extraordinarily beautiful $11M budget 1975 movie could somehow set a standard for lushness in the “period movie” genre that a $23M budget 2004 movie could fall so miserably short of. Were the lessons on costume, cinematography, and especially lighting somehow not totally apparent? Are they that hard to follow? Okay maybe but isn’t it at all compelling to… try?

My problem here isn’t that Reese Witherspoon’s never sweaty or that her dresses look like they were made in 2003 for the movie, but that her world fails to present as a living thing wriggling beyond the frame. The frame itself rarely shows more than a talking torso, and even some entire story locations – e.g. the best friend’s poverty farmhouse, or James Purefoy’s landing in “the tropics” – are visually left downright vague. The whole thing feels like looking at a painting with an overworked middle where the painter clearly didn’t bother considering the edges.

We saw the Delacroix show at the Met the other week; pretty cool that a productive person can keep busy enough to make a lush beguiling world of work that can survive ~200 years and the trip to NYC. Zoom in on the Faust drawings; sick at the from-the-hand drawing level. Zoom out on I dunno, “the Battle of Nancy”; sick at the room-swallowing macro level too. Pretty cool that art history continued its trek to present day NYC as well. Back in the studio, the feeling isn’t that Delacroix killed ultra-dynamic representational painting so completely that Instagram-era painters should chill and stick to making half-baked paintings of the Photoshop interface or whatever, because “that’s all that’s left.” It’s the opposite: The feeling is of the insane challenge to synthesize inspiring things, learning from and advancing them. When I see stuff that’s not interested in this challenge/conversation in whatever format, such as here, I briefly wonder what drove its authorship at all, right before I stop thinking abt it entirely.