Title: The Last Duel
Director: Sir Ridley Scott
Language: Inglese, Francese
Running time: 152'
The Last Duel by Sir Ridley Scott is a movie at odds with itself. As the title suggests, it tells the story of the last legal duel fought in medieval France, but not really. The duel isn’t quite central to the plot, not as much as the reason why the duel was fought is, or at least should be. The reason is that a woman was raped, and even though it was the 1300s, she wasn’t afraid to speak up for herself and have her aggressor pay for his crimes.
After coming back from war, knight Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) is told by his wife, Marguerite (Jodie Comer) that she has been raped by his friend, squire Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver). Marguerite decides she wants her husband to bring Le Gris to trial, but no one believes her. To defend his and her honour, Jean decides to challenge Le Gris to a duel.
The story is told three times: first from Jean’s point of view, and we can see how he doesn’t know much because he was away; then we have Le Gris’ side of the story, and we see how he has a very distorted idea of the facts, as he thinks what they did was love; and finally we get Marguerite’s version, which gets elevated to “truth” in what seems an attempt to avoid any controversy on the nature of the movie. There is a big problem in this. Of course, we appreciate that the director felt the need to specify that Marguerite’s point of view is how things really went, but, while watching the movie, we can really tell that the story was told by men: the book from which it takes inspiration was written by Eric Jager, the screenplay was written by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and only one female writer, Nicole Holofcener, and the movie was directed by a man. There’s nothing obvious about The Last Duel that really gives away the predominance of men in this production, it’s just something subtle about everything in this movie that brings out the male gaze. What we feel while watching it is that a group of men was trying to be understanding but kind of failing at restraining their male perspective on the matter.
The idea of telling it three times was good in theory, as each time new details fall into place, but at times it gets way too much, and the male gaze drips also into Marguerite’s point of view, instead of being relegated to Jean and Le Gris’ versions. The movie is also really long, it probably could have been a lot shorter. The predominance of this male perspective is probably also given by something that ends acquiring a lot of importance in the narration: the ruined friendship between the male protagonists, and at times we feel like Jean blames it on Marguerite. One could argue that this is because the movie takes place in the 1300s, but we feel like historical accuracy isn’t really the reason for it. If we really wanted to blame the end of their friendship on someone other than Le Gris, we could point our finger to Count Pierre d’Alençon (Ben Affleck), whose behaviour could make sick literally everyone.
The problem with The Last Duel is that it’s almost a political drama, with a love triangle that turns into a rape, which seems almost like an accident. Oh, and also there’s a duel, but we don’t really care about it in the end. All we get is three men, De Carrouges, Le Gris and Count Pierre playing politics at the expense of a woman’s peaceful life. Another movie with the male gaze on rape, and, in 2021, we are tired of it.
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