Culture

“The Last Duel,” Reviewed: Ridley Scott’s Wannabe #MeToo Movie


Apparently, a good man was hard to find in the Middle Ages. At least, there aren’t any on hand in Ridley Scott’s new film, “The Last Duel” (now in theatres), which is set in France in the late fourteenth century, amid the ruinous Hundred Years’ War and social disturbances in the wake of the Black Death. Its duelling male protagonists—whose joust to the death, on December 29, 1386, is both the movie’s framing device and dénouement—are bums with asterisks. Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), an aristocrat and a respected warrior, took part in the Battle of Limoges, against English troops, in 1370, and proved both insubordinate and reckless. Defying orders to hold fire, he bravely yet vainly led a charge that was defeated. His life was saved in that dubious battle by his friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), a squire, educated and suave and no less courageous in battle, but also a notorious womanizer and a courtier to Count Pierre d’Alençon (Ben Affleck), a sybarite and a libertine who relied on Le Gris to keep his accounts and tweak his wardrobe and join in his debauchery.

The details of their failings are fascinating—and historically documented. The poor, peevish, and litigious Carrouges married, for her dowry, Marguerite de Thibouville (Jodie Comer), the daughter of the disgraced aristocrat Robert de Thibouville (Nathaniel Parker), who’d been a treasonous sympathizer of the English, and, when one of the lands in the dowry ended up in the hands of Le Gris, Carrouges sued. Le Gris gained Pierre’s confidence by volunteering as a tax collector whose practices the film depicts as a medieval and aristocratic forebear to Mafia shakedowns—and whose efforts extorted the coveted property from Robert. Frozen out of Pierre’s court, Carrouges (prompted by the wise counsel of Marguerite) reconciles, at a celebration, with Le Gris—who, with his flirtatious ways and literary learning, there engages the similarly educated Marguerite in a conversation that, for her, is a red flag and, for him, a wellspring of unreciprocated desire. Years later, after winning his knighthood in Scotland during another failed expedition, Carrouges returns home, then heads to Paris to collect funds due him—and, while he’s away, Le Gris (gaining entrance to the Carrouges castle thanks to the deceit of his squire, Adam Louvel, played by Adam Nagaitis) declares his love for Marguerite and, when she rejects him, chases her to her bedroom and rapes her. Then, when Marguerite accuses him of rape—and when Carrouges spreads word of it far and wide—it’s Pierre who counsels Le Gris to “Deny, deny, deny,” because it’s Pierre who, corruptly, serves as judge, hears the charges, and summarily finds for his friend and enabler Le Gris.

In this gallery of woeful men, the one who displays the hardiest core of virtue amid his many conspicuous failings is Carrouges. He believes Marguerite when she says that Le Gris raped her and, after the acquittal by Pierre, he appeals to the frivolous, smirking king—Charles VI (Alex Lawther), a.k.a. Charles the Mad, another woeful piece of work—for the right to duel Le Gris, a battle that was believed to embody God’s judgment. Thus, if Carrouges kills Le Gris, he is presumed to have proved the case; but if Le Gris kills Carrouges, Marguerite, too, will be punished—burned at the stake on the presumption that her sworn testimony was perjured. (According to the warped laws of the time, as the drama makes clear, rape wasn’t considered a violent crime against the female victim but a property crime against her husband, her so-called guardian.)

All bums—and all real-life people. The story is based on a copious historical record (dating back to Froissart’s “Chronicles,” which are nearly contemporaneous with the events) and the script—by Nicole Holofcener, Affleck, and Damon—is adapted from a recent work of history, “The Last Duel,” by the literary scholar Eric Jager. The movie is built in three long chapters, each labelled “The Truth According to” Carrouges, Le Gris, and Marguerite, respectively (though the filmmakers tip their hand by leaving the title card for Marguerite’s chapter a bit longer, while effacing all the words but two: “The truth”). Yet the construction of the film isn’t exactly “Rashomon”-like; it doesn’t show three completely different versions of the events as much as it shows the same events from three perspectives, with the addition of new facts left out by the other two. Taken together, the three segments tell something like the over-all story, including the characters’ different interpretations of what happened.

Because of its he-said, she-said premise, “The Last Duel” has been hailed as something of a #MeToo movie in a medieval setting. In the sharpest dialogue in the film, Carrouges’s shrewish mother (Harriet Walter) blames Marguerite for making the rape claim; she tells her daughter-in-law that she, too, was raped when she was young and said nothing—not least, so as not to force her husband into a battle of honor. She also notes that their fate, as ladies, is no different from that of peasant women who are raped by soldiers in conquered lands—a subject that ought to have opened a large new dimension in the movie’s dialogue and the women’s relationship.

There is no such extended conversation between mother and daughter. For that matter, there’s hardly any talk worth hearing in the entire movie.The bit of ornamentally expressive dialogue that there is—Le Gris’s reading and extemporaneous translation of cynical Latin aphorisms about love, and his literary discussion with Marguerite (partly in German, about the thirteenth-century romance “Parzival”)—merely serves to advance their semblance of a friendship. There’s a reason that Shakespeare endures: he gave warriors and ladies of the court, no less than their rulers and their fools, copious inner lives and glorious words to express them with. The gruff and taciturn Carrouges, who’s illiterate, is given little to say—except when it comes to the merits of horseflesh. Elsewhere the curt dialogue features absurdly stilted Hollywood medievalese (with clumsy accents and inflections to match) and laughable anachronisms (as when Carrouges, preparing to go to battle, tells Marguerite, “This is what I do.”) Marguerite in particular is diminished by the paltry script. Without warfare and court business for her to engage in, the movie has little to show beside brief depictions of her thoughtful and successful efforts to fulfill (and to improve on) her husband’s administrative functions in his absence.

Scott’s filming is similarly both bombastic and flimsy. Several hurried battle scenes of armored warriors hacking away at one another’s chain mail suggest the unromantic brutality of medieval warfare, but they do so with neither character nor humanity. The depiction of the climactic duel is much more extensive yet no less generalized and anecdotal. The images are more hacked up than the bodies. There’s little choreographic sense (a shame, because the bit that there is, during head-on horse charges, is terrifying and thrilling for a fraction of a second) and, though I’m sure that Damon and Driver did plenty of swordplay rehearsal, Scott merely amps up and draws out suspense with little apparent interest in observing, parsing, and conveying their physicality.

The most disturbing and dissonant aspect of “The Last Duel” involves the filming of the sexual crime at its center. The assault is shown twice; the first time, in Le Gris’s chapter, in which he takes his pleasure and the soundtrack conveys what sounds like sighs and moans of pleasure from Marguerite. (At the hearing to determine whether Carrouges will have royal leave to duel Le Gris, Marguerite is asked whether she took pleasure from the encounter; she says no.) In Marguerite’s chapter—the one labelled “the truth”—the rape is shown a second time. During the scene of Carrouges forcing his way, through deception, into the castle, and forcing his way, through speed and strength, into Marguerite’s bedroom, I was gripped with unease—not with horror but with a queasy sense of witnessing a visual exploitation of that horror. Would we really be made to watch the rape again? Indeed, and this time, while Le Gris is forceably penetrating Marguerite, Scott shows her face, in closeup, and reveals that she’s crying.

What is the purpose of an image? That question is the very subject of “The Last Duel”: most rapists leave no photographic evidence of their crime, which is why the very notion of whose claim gets credence is central to achieving moral and legal redress. Scott depicts the events of the story literally—and he even declares, with the title labelling Marguerite’s perspective “the truth,” that he, too, believes her. Yet if he’d had the courage of his belief—and the cinematic artistry and, even more, the cinematic ethic—he could have chosen not to show the rape even once. He could have put the cinematic onus on the viewer—and, more important, on himself—to affirm that Le Gris raped Marguerite, to believe her not because Scott himself created his own image of ostensible veracity to justify and prove her claim but because she said so. Instead, “The Last Duel” is a wannabe #MeToo movie, the cavalier abuse of experience at six centuries’ remove.


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