The Last Duel (Disney-Hotstar)
Starring Matt Damon,Adam Driver, Jodie Comer, Ben Affleck
Directed by Ridley Scott
Rating: *** ½
There is probably a greater film submerged in this good film. We will never know.Just as we will never know if Marguerite de Carrouges, the noblewoman who is played with a seductive sublimity by the underrated British actress Jodie Comer, was really raped by her husband’s former friend and soldier colleague.
Was she brutally raped , as she claims, or was there some kind of a come-hither invitation, some sort of pleasurable plug-point during the plunder as we saw in Paul Verhoeven’s disturbing French film Elle where Isabelle Rupert looks forward to a revisit from her masked marauder.
In The Last Duel, the great Ridley Scott has constructed a slippery edifice teetering dangerously on the border between truth and conjecture. Recalling one of the earliest reported cases of rape, it examines the sensitivities of the issue and the intricacies of the court hearing in a tone that is sometimes luminous, sometimes labored.
It is as though director Ridley Scott WANTS to believe in his heroine’s truth. But is not fully convinced. A part of the problem is Matt Damon’s flabby interpretation of the husband Sir Jean de Carrouges who is righteous but dull, agile but frumpy, and most inept in bed. His friend turned foe as played by Adam Driver is a complete ladies’ man who is known to seduce woman like other men behead their enemies on the battlefield.
You can’t cast Driver against Damon and expect the audience to pitch for the latter.
So what really happened between Marguerite and Jacques Le Gris? Did he really fuck her against her will?She says he did, He says he did not. Three different interpretations of the truth are compiled into a compelling drama of amorous ambivalence. Jacques goes to his eventual death swearing on God there was no rape while Marguerite remains steadfast in her accusation.
Based on the 2004 book The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial by Combat in Medieval France by Eric Jager and set in medieval France, The Last Duel is a wannabe masterpiece that stops short of attaining its full power and glory by dint of its ambivalence.
Does rape become consent if the woman obtains sexual pleasure in the violent act?
These are not questions that could be asked, let alone answered, in any civilized society.To his credit Ridley Scott takes no shortcuts, offers no easy solution to the problem which plagues the plot both organically and extrinsically. While the three main characters grapple with the issue in their conscience and in the court of King Charles V1(played with infantile imperiousness by Alex Lawther) the three protagonists fight their own private battles.
A shroud of uncertainty covers this remarkable but fatally flawed film. Can a film on a historic rape case from the 14th century be put on screen without the writers(Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon) and director taking sides? Apparently, it can. The Last Duel gets away with a far-from-conclusive projection of the alleged rape. It doesn’t bother to be politically correct. It looks at male predatoriness as a routine act, and hence excusable.
There is a strangely supine tug ‘o’ war played out between Marguerite and her mother-in-law(played by the brilliant veteran British actress Harriet Walter). In it , we see what is clearly the problem with women: it is not the men but the women themselves who can’t support one another .