Not So Flawless Victory: The Duel at the Music Box
By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 19, 2010 8:40PM
There is a duel at the heart of The Duel, Dover Koshashvili's beautiful Chekhov adaptation opening tomorrow night at the Music Box, but the "pointing the pistols at one another" part is the only one that seems to go according to plan. That's about right for this drama of near misses, self-inflicted wounds and collateral damage. If you're looking for punches that land squarely, you'll probably want to look away.
Koshashvili and cinematographer Paul Sarossy went to Croatia to recreate Chekhov's sumptuous Black Sea setting, and apparently hold diplomas from Terrence Malick's School of Natural Lighting and Magic Hour Filmmaking, but they get the balance just right: you get your lush period setting realistically created but it never steals the show.
Neither do the actors, really, though they hold up their end pretty well. Andrew Scott stars as the self-important but terminally lazy bureaucrat Laevsky, who receives word that his mistress Nadia (Fiona Glascott) has suddenly become a widow. This development seems to bother him more than her having been married to another man during the course of their affair, which brought them from more metropolitan environments to what he clearly views as an isolated, backwater resort town. What does he do now? Break with her? Marry her? Run away?
His friend Samoylenko sympathizes to a degree, and it's a credit to Scott's performance that the audience does so as well. All charm and self-deprecation, he's a bit rakish, always up for a game of cards or a glass of wine. But not everyone is willing to overlook a moral compass that seems to point in whichever direction the path is easiest, and certainly not the local naturalist, Van Koren, played with convincing indignance by Tobias Menzies. Here is someone who takes his own rectitude so seriously he can convince himself that a gun in his hand might be an agent of Darwinian survival of the fittest.
The Duel is not as finely honed as Koshashvili's justly acclaimed Late Marriage, perhaps as a result of channeling that observational energy through the lens of Chekhov's 19th century, in turn refracted through English translations in the mouths of Irish actors. Still, Chekhov's ideas are let loose set in a seemingly lived-in world that is a pleasure to look at for 98 minutes, and the result is engrossing and thoughtful, even where it misses its target.
The Duel opens at The Music Box tomorrow