A film of many names, Duelle is more properly ‘Duelle (une quarantaine)’, or if you really want to go all out ‘Scènes de la vie parallèle: 2 – Duelle (une quarantaine)’; furthermore Unifrance suggests that the sales team labels it in English as ‘Women Duelling’, while Jonathan Rosenbaum claims that the director’s preferred English titles was ‘Twhylight’. Quite a few to choose from there, but the French ‘Duelle’ is probably what it’s best known as. ‘Duelle’ isn’t a real word, well, in as much as a word can be real or not; it’s a feminised version of the masculine ‘duel’, which, would you believe it, means the same in French as in English? Of course, you do. Any idiot knows that.

As that full French title might suggest, the second part of Jacques Rivette’s tetralogy of female lead fantasies based around the pre-Lenten Carnival period, as inspired by the writings of Jean Markale and Claude Gaignebet, which were filmed concurrently. This is incidentally a lie. Despite being labelled the second part, this was actually the first to materialise; the intended first was cancelled after the director had himself a good old fashioned nervous breakdown a couple of days into filming (it was eventually restarted and saw the light of day (or not, ‘cause it’s a film) in 2003, though it apparently differed considerably from the original plan and Rivette didn’t deem it part of the cycle). Also, despite being planned a tetralogy, the fourth part never came to be at all. Not that its status as the second-ish part is all that important, as beyond their various motifs, there isn’t any particular connection between the stories.

In this context, the relevance of the Carnival thing is to do with the transition of winter into spring. In the late winter, two women (Juliet Berto and Bulle Ogier) are searching for a mysterious missing diamond that has been filched by a man of questionable relationship to them, employing amateur investigators (Hermine Karagheuz and Jean Babilée) to find it. If you went in blind, that’s all you’re getting, but marketing being what it is has to explain more; this isn’t some noir-ish mystery, or at least it isn’t only some noir-ish mystery, these two femmes fatales are in fact the queens of the moon and the sun, respectively, and the legendary wish granting diamond that they seek will bestow upon one of them to power to stay on Earth rather than be banished with change of seasons. It also doubles as an utterly hideous choker. Oh, and it’s radioactive or something. Everyone who takes hold of the Fairy Godmother diamond becomes obsessed with it à la the one ring, and also contracts a vague but fatal malady that is quite contagious. The queens will, naturally, stop at almost nothing to obtain it, and the plot thickens. I feel somewhat bad mentioning some of that, as the reveal isn’t until a good halfway through the film, but, as I say, if you look up pretty much anything about the film it’ll feel compelled to spoil it, even in the official marketing, so there’s little reason for me to be coy about it.

Man, all my story ideas are already Rivette films. 

True to form for Rivette, at least by this point in the ‘70s, there’s a quasi-documentarian nature to the work’s style with a soundtrack that is entirely diegetic. There is still a fair bit of music though; seemingly the entire cast are being stalked by a man with a piano. Seriously, there’s a band in the background of a lot of scenes regardless of whether it makes sense as part of the narrative and no one ever comments on it. It adds to the strangeness of the piece as a whole, not least because, as you might have surmised from my vague appraisal of the plot, it isn’t exactly naturalist stuff. Instead this is reportedly an homage to Val Lewton’s noir-ish horror thrillers of the ‘40s, such as Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). I’m not really in a position to compare very well, as the only one of those I’ve seen is The Body Snatcher (1945) which as I recall doesn’t really have quite the same noir-ish quality of the better-known films, instead favouring a more traditional gothic tone. Regardless, while I’d be hard pushed to label Duelle as horror, it never the less enjoys a masterful sense of menace and threat throughout, with a very real sense of the danger posed by the queens; they wield unfathomable power and are not beholden to the same notions of morality as the humans.

The film is gorgeously shot with a marvellous sense of place and timing, with the whole thing being beautifully constructed on most fronts. It’s not without its problems though. Not being fluent in French, I’m not going to bother trying to appraise the acting, as trying to pass judgement on performances in languages you don’t understand properly is a fool’s errand, at least beyond the physical side. On that front, Berto and Ogier pull off mysterious and dangerous, and generally rather alien, pretty damn well. The problem, perhaps more scriptural, is the human characters who are rather bland in comparison. Babilée’s male lead is boring and unlikeable, yet receives an awful lot of screen time, and Lucie, the effective focal character, is rather dull as well, though at least she fairs a bit better. Presumably her overwhelming blandness as a character is to strengthen her status as the audience identification figure, the everywoman, but it doesn’t quite land. There’s certainly some plot holes as well; it’s revealed, perhaps inevitably, that the queens’ weaknesses are light and shadow, delete as appropriate (this is part of the reason for one of the proposed English titles; their inevitable duel is set for twilight, when they are both evenly matched), except they apparently manage just fine in such conditions throughout the film, except for, you know, when the plot demands they don’t. I mean, Ogier’s sun queen spends the bulk of her screen time in a dimly lit gambling parlour.

Still, perhaps that’s churlish. You might have noticed the subtitle ‘une quarantaine’; a bit more ambiguous than its follow-up’s ‘une vengeance’ (the second/third film, Noroît, is a loose adaptation of The Revenger’s Tragedy, and has vengeance as a key element of the plot). Here, the meaning is not so obvious, however it seems to me that the film is ultimately about isolation and loneliness. Everyone in the cast ultimately stands alone, the contagion destroying whomsoever they get close to; Berto’s moon queen suggests that the real reason they’re seeking the Fairy Godmother is so as they can finally attain death rather than continue to live alone forever. While it’s open to interpretation as to whether she’s telling the truth, certainly there are things in the film to suggest otherwise, one thing is for certain from the film; doom is inevitable, as everyone soon destroys each other, intentionally or not.