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From Conrad, a replete gallery on the enigma of honor. It proceeds from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp as a corrosive reflection, the arrival of the 19th-century sees reason and its opposite, "a long association." Strasbourg fields for the introductory glimpse of the zealous lieutenant (Harvey Keitel) gladly skewering an opponent, the vantage point is that of a little goose herder as a way of setting up the Gainsborough treatment. A reprimand from his superior becomes an imagined slight from the delivering officer (Keith Carradine), he shoots the messenger or rather demands satisfaction in a grudge of sixteen years. Separated then brought together by war, a militaristic coitus interruptus through courtships and marriages and epidemics and regime changes, from dragoons to generals. "You make duels sound like a pastime in the Garden of Eden!" Ridley Scott in his film debut takes exhaustive note of Kubrick's discoveries in Barry Lyndon: A signature shot begins with a still-life of wine bottle and glass and half-eaten bread and pear before the slow zoom reveals a chamber with slanting golden light and sprawled figure playing the flute. The comic madness of "a light cavalry skirmish" snowballing in the shadow of Napoleon's campaigns, drolly pondered by sideline cameos (sharp portraiture from Albert Finney, Edward Fox and Robert Stephens) and presented with painterly intensity: A horseback joust between the rivals while mist engulfs the woods around them, the frigid Armageddon of a Russian winter, finally pistols at dawn on a Corot meadow. A technocrat's neoclassical salon, electrified by Keitel's perverse fire—beneath the buttoned uniform lurks a demon, all too aware in the end that a dead man is really the one denied his obsession. "They don't all fight like gentlemen, sir." Cinematography by Frank Tidy. With Cristina Raines, Tom Conti, John McEnery, Diana Quick, Alun Armstrong, Meg Wynn Owen, Alan Webb, and Jenny Runacre.
--- Fernando F. Croce |