The Duelist (2016)

Yakovlev (Pyotr Fyodorov) is a professional duelist in 1860s St. Peterburg. If a Russian nobleman that finds yourself facing a duel, the excessive list of dueling rules state that if unable to duel, someone can duel in their place. Much like the A-Team, if you can contrive a reason why you can't duel personally, and if you can find him (probably passed out drunk), then, for a fee, Yakovlev will duel in your place. Count Beklimishev (Vladimir Mashkov) in particular, has been using Yakovlev to eliminate people the count owes money.

But Yakovlev is actually a former noble named Kolychev. The circumstances of this are gradually explained in flashbacks that start with Kolychev's near-death in the Aleutians, and work backwards to how he got there. They do, however, involve Beklimishev.

As Yakovlev, Fyodorov keeps his hair cut short, and he's paler, thinner than he was as Kolychev, but he maintains similar mannerisms. He sits sideways in chairs, slumped shoulders. Kolychev doesn't like dueling, doesn't see the point, until he does.

Yakovlev is a great shooter, even supplements his income by putting on trick-shooting exhibitions that he carries out with a dead-eyed, disinterested expression. But he has no love for it, and less for dueling. He always allows his opponent the first shot, and when it's his turn, he makes it quick. 

I think of the duel between Gregory Peck and Chuck Conners in The Big Country, where Peck holds off on his shot and allows Conners to reveal himself as a coward (also Peck has no interest in actually killing Conners).

More than revenge, Yakovlev's trying to raise enough money to bribe officials to have his original family name placed back on the rolls of nobles. So there's a push-and-pull of motivations, and he can't simply shoot Beklimishev in the back of the head on a dark street because murder didn't work out so well for him last time.

The tipping point comes when Beklimishev hires Yakovlev to kill a young prince trying to protect his sister from the count. The prince is a polite, agreeable young man who's been hoodwinked by a man who claimed to be his friend, and instead set him up to die slowly and painfully. Yakovlev refuses, but this makes him an enemy of the count rather than a tool, so his whole game explodes. He can't duel Beklimishev properly, and he finds his bribery plan blocked, also by Beklimishev.

I'm surprised that at that point, he refuses to simply track down the count and shoot him down like a dog, but I guess that's the point. His "nobility" was taken from him, ultimately for refusing to do something he considered ignoble. To kill the count outside a duel, would be ignoble and confirm that he fall was deserved. I don't think wandering the disgusting docks of St. Petersburg, drunk off his ass in the rain, is all that noble, but there's probably some exemption for that in the rules about dueling.

I never realized there were so many variations to dueling. The first duel involves two pistols, one not loaded. Each man picks a gun, then they stand face-to-face, guns pointed the others' forehead, and one pulls the trigger. When Yakovlev's opponent gets an empty click, Yakovlev quickly raises his pistol and kills the man. That's what has to happen, so no sense dragging it out. Another involves a silk screen hiding the duelists from each other. A third from opposite sides of the room, with a sword stuck in the ground between them.

One is simply Russian roulette, which led to a discussion between my dad and I about how it's usually depicted in Western media (this movie is Russian). In this version, one round goes in the revolver, they Yakovlev spins the chamber, then they take turns pulling the trigger. My dad said he'd usually seen it depicted that the chamber is spun after every shot, so the odds are 1-in-6 for each trigger pull. I've only ever seen it like this, where the odds of landing on the bullet rise with each pull. 1-in-6, to 1-in-5, to 1-in-4 and so on.