Anton Chekhov's The Duel stars Andrew Scott, Fiona Glascott, Tobias Menzies and the incredibly beautiful scenery of Croatia standing in for the Russian Caucases.
Andrew plays the lead character, Laevsky, an indolent Russian bureaucrat stuck in a miserable situation of his own making. He has run off with a married woman that he has grown to loathe more and more as she runs up bills he can't pay for frivolous hats, and flirts with every available man.
The movie gets underway as we hear Andrew's high-pitched voice yelling out, "Savages, savages!" before we see him. However, Laevsky is not chasing someone with a whip for stealing or robbing, or some such useful endeavor. Rather he is drunkenly catching potatoes on knives and forks which other revelers are lobbing at him as a way to entertain themselves. The surprising twists in the story begin with the smallest of these in this scene. From there the tale bends on itself end over end until what we think we know about the three main characters becomes merely a charade which they have unwittingly played on themselves, as well as us. No one is all good or all bad and that is the most interesting thing about them.
Laevsky, played by Andrew Scott, is the type of man you feel you should hate. He's lazy, unhappy, prone to drinking, gambling, smoking and crying. He walks around the small Russian country town wearing his slippers and gossiping about women with his like-minded companions. Von Koren (Menzies), the stuck-up priggish zoologist who in another time and place you could easily see as the head of the Young Republicans Association, does hate Laevsky. For all those reasons and more. We can't help feeling that he hates him so much, maybe he's a little jealous of him too. Freedom in one tends to fester hatred in those unable to feel that freedom themselves.
Yet the kindly town doctor who is so good he hates to ask his patients for the money they owe him, is the closest friend Laevsky has. Is the doctor just a pushover or does he see something worth saving in the disagreeable, whiny lout that no one else has been able to? Perhaps the doctor is a Pollyanna, but maybe Laevsky really will send for Nadia after he blows town on the good doctor's borrowed money. He said he would.
Nadia and Laevsky have a relationship that is at once funny, sad and desperate. The lady seems to be dying for want of Laevsky's affection and when he does decide he will allow her to close the door to his study and remain within, the passion that both have bottled up inside them comes furiously out.
The duel scene itself builds some of the most remarkable suspense I've ever felt watching the screen. Andrew's gauntlet of emotions is thrilling, frightening and heart-grabbing by turns. The changes the character must go through from the beginning of the duel to it's conclusion is nothing short of a total transformation. Tobias Menzies is a terrific actor as well, and helps to provide the match of the strong and the weak in the shaded and nuanced manner it requires. The director, Dover Koshashvili, does a great service to the story by letting it unfold at a human pace, and keeping his camera on the faces of the actors so we feel we are experiencing exactly what they're going through.
Fiona Glascott also undergoes some serious changes as Nadia. The Duel has many wonderful scenes in it and I laughed out loud as the only woman in town (Michelle Fairley) who befriended this wanton adulteress gives her the bare facts of what she really thinks of her now that Nadia's husband has died and she has no protection from the world. She goes on and on until you think she may never run out of words while Nadia looks more and more bewildered.
Chekhov sounds like the kind of writer you only read when you're forced to. Russian writers have the reputation for depressing, dreary, long tales of men and women with names to match. As Andrew replied to a question posed to him at the talk after the movie about how a mostly Irish cast ended up in a movie playing Russians, the two groups seem to have a similar psychological makeup. Russian or Irish, the casting was right on target.
