The Duellists

Most prolific directors do not start their careers just out of school with one of their best films ever made to date.  Ridley Scott, arguably, does just that with The Duellists as an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “The Duel” in spectacular fashion by sticking to the simplicity he knows will work and exploring the complexities of character development instead of plot twisting.  This film was made in 1977 when Scott was beginning as a director instead of a set designer and took matters into his own hands in order to create this major motion picture.  Davis’s breakdown of the history of the film reveals much of why Conrad made the choices he did in his novel and how that lead to Scott’s development of a film that questions the validity of honor in a world driven by war. 

Honor as a theme of The Duellists displays itself as anything but subtle by tearing at the heart of every character introduced throughout the film.  The obvious examples of our two main characters are utilized as depictions of human emotion versus rigid military structure. D’Hubert, our military man, and Feraud, the passionate man, engage in a lifelong battle for the ultimate honor. In the end of what seems like will be a final battle to certain death D’Hubert shows Feraud what it means to truly be victorious by letting him live and thereby never setting him free of his debt.  Juxtaposing these two characters proves Conrad’s point that defending one’s honor pervades all levels of the hierarchy of society because D’Hubert’s wealthy background forces him to maintain a certain level of honor whereas Feraud’s lower status leaves him to defend his honor because he if he does not he is left with nothing else.  By the end of the film we have seen D’Hubert change from a strict military man into a more family conscious man, but Feraud undergoes almost no dynamic change of any sort.  Scott makes these transformations, or lack thereof, rather obvious to even the common viewer, possibly because receiving the underlying message is more crucial to him than the complexity of a plotline.  Each man’s display of honor becomes more than an individual pursuit of honorability; it transforms into a conflict over honor in relation to each other.  Their lives become intertwined to the point that we can no longer distinguish which man has the greater honor without relating it to the other.  This dependence is crucial to Scott’s development of the idea that honor is relative, and it is therefore seemingly pointless to fight so long over what started as such a mundane scuttle. 

One scene in particular that struck me as cinematically intriguing and thematically complex was the third duel between Armand D’Hubert and Gabriel Feraud.  This duel takes place in a barn where the two men are fatigued almost to the point of death, yet they keep on fighting in the quest to prove their ultimate strength over the other opponent.  Scott throws us into this scene in the middle, if not closer to the end, of this particular skirmish.  In the other fights up to this point we see the men begin and end each battle rather quickly, but here they have clearly been going at it for a while and are both beaten and bruised extensively.  The barn where they are engaging in hand-to-hand combat is dark and gloomy and Scott makes the choice to slowly pull the camera away from the men showing more and more of the emptiness of the barn and the few spectators that have gathered on the outskirts to watch the spectacle that has become their personal war.  I believe it was at this point that I began to realize how drawn out their engagements were going to be with each other.  By setting the scene with no background music for them to dance around to we are allowed to see the reality of the fight and how brutally the men are fighting for themselves.  They are desperately falling over their swords and hanging on to each other, but neither will let up and allow a bitter and unfulfilling win.  This pivotal scene begins the decline of the formality of the duels where it has become more personal than of a strict military importance to both parties. 

Scott’s career goes on to explore the intricate relationships between characters and how he can cinematically challenge himself to engage audiences of all kinds.  Like George Lucas he finds solace in a message that is not subtle or obscure, but something that their viewers can easily pick up on and participate in discourse about.  Each of their premier films deal with some heavy subjects that are societally significant to understand, but in the end it was Scott that appealed to a larger viewership and dealt with his issues in a more relatable way.