Willard sees Bill Graham, the promoter from the night before, motioning to him from the mouth of the tent. It turns out that Graham wants to make a deal to trade two barrels of diesel fuel for a little time with the Playmates. Willard happily tells the boat crew the good news. Chief stays behind to work on the boat.

Both Lance and Chef end up with Playmates. Lance paints his Playmate with camouflage make-up. Chef tries to transform his girl into another that he remembers from a centerfold. Meanwhile, the girls talk about being told to do things you don't want to do and raising birds at Busch Gardens. They're both terrible actresses, which Coppola probably knows.

But it's hard to tell what Coppola is trying to do with the scene. We learn that the men don't really care much about the individual girls, but that's hardly a surprise -- they exist in a world without any women. So are we supposed to equate the exploitative way these women are being used with the way that these soldiers are told to blindly follow orders? About the only conclusive thing the scene establishes is why Willard has to get out of the boat later on at the bridge to look for fuel. (Although you could imagine that Coppola has Willard ingratiate himself to his boatmates again so he'll fall further in their estimation when he kills an injured civilian woman in the next scene.)

The biggest addition to the new version of the film comes after the firefight that kills Clean. The boat slowly motors up to what appears to be a dilapidated hotel on the banks of the river. Again, Willard steps off the boat. The crew hears a voice shout out in French. Chef, who is from Louisiana, answers it. The American crew is soon surrounded by a well organized, well armed unit of Frenchman wearing scarves and smoking cigarettes. They are accompanied by armed Vietnamese.

One of the Frenchmen says that Willard and crew are welcome. They step ashore and bury Clean in a formal military ceremony, draping his body with the boat's tattered flag.

The crew is welcomed to a French rubber plantation run by several generations, who seem well entrenched and surrounded by the comforts of colonial goods, like elephant tusks and canopied beds. Willard notices a beautiful woman (Aurore Clement) gazing down upon him from a large veranda. The crew sits down to a formal dinner with the French, who are all dressed like extras in a Merchant-Ivory picture.

At dinner, the Frenchmen talk with Willard about the history of French colonialism in Vietnam and the origins of the American involvement in the war. "Why don't you Americans learn from our mistakes?" one of them says, adding that he is fighting for his family while "you are fighting for the biggest nothing in history."

The Frenchmen end up arguing about communism and socialism and soon only Willard and the woman from the veranda, a widow, remain. She invites him to join her for a cognac. He declines and says that he needs to get back to the boat. "The war will still be here tomorrow," she says. We see exactly where this is going.

Sort of. The two talk for a while. Willard tells her that he will never go home. She puts him in bed and smokes him up with opium. She tells him that Willard, as a soldier, is like her husband. "There are two of you, don't you see? One that kills, and one that loves ... All that matters is that you are still alive."

And that's it. The scene is long and sluggish, and it slows down the movie right before we get to Kurtz (although it does give us some time to recover from Clean's death before we have to watch Chief die). But it's there for a reason. It further connects the film to Conrad's novel, expressing the same ambivalent feelings toward colonialism (and reminding us of the historical origins of the war.) We're supposed to admire these French for sticking to their guns, but at the same time, recognize that they are strange, anachronistic creatures -- people who belong to another time.

The scene's most important function, though, is that it makes clear the nature of the battle within Willard's soul. "There are two of you, don't you see?" the woman tells him. "One that kills, one that loves." Those words resonate, reminding us of what the stakes are for Willard -- and for us -- as we go into the final scene with Kurtz.

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