Critics reviews

The transposition of myth and fairytale to a contemporary Paris setting has precedent in Cocteau, and invocations of film noir provide comfortable aesthetic and narrative reference points. As the quotes above suggest, however, these anchors are merely the framework for something far more challenging and ineffable.

Rivette counter-intuitively couches this florid fairy-tale material in a hard-bitten film-noir framework, going so far as to toss in explicit visual references to The Lady from Shanghai and The Big Sleep. There's even a callback to Celine and Julie when trenchcoat-clad taxi dancer Elsa (Nicole Garcia) inexpertly trails Viva through the streets. Duelle achieves its most surreal and poetic effects through the cognitive dissonance of this sort of generic juxtaposition.

The strength of Berto's performance comes from the intersection of this non-naturalistic line of acting with a silent-era quality she bears naturally: her photogénie. And in her case, the photogenic energy is even more original because it is freed from the male gaze of yesteryear. Berto attacks that dominance with a character that is distant, queer, and unpredictably powerful.

The metteur-en-scène's vérité style is used to prowl on edge of these mystical interactions, captured in long takes grounded firmly in the reality of Paris' haunting streets. Nothing is ever for certain in the rabidly experimental, Duelle, where Two and Two no longer make Four.

If I had to recommend one film over the other, it would be hard to know which one to choose. [Duelle] has a much more difficult plot [than Norôit] but is perhaps the more conventionally beautiful: its reinvented, somewhat campy Paris of plush casinos and archaic dance halls alludes to many periods at once but can still be loosely located within a tradition of nostalgic French fantasy shared by such filmmakers as Cocteau and Georges Franju.