The Last Duel

Film is an amazing art form for showing us just how little we’ve changed over time. It can affirm its point in a heavy handed or light touch way, but the experience of watching and listening to a story can often be the most effective way to get a message across.

Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is set in the late 1300’s but is an all too relatable tale of abuse, societal and political failings and how truth can change wildly from one person to another.

Based on the true story of France’s last ever trial by combat, the film is a portmanteau telling the same story from three different perspectives: knight Jean de Carrouges, his wife Lady Marguerite de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris, a squire with powerful friends, and former friend of Jean, who Marguerite accuses of rape.

It’s a masterful narrative device, intelligently replaying scenes with different dialogue (each ‘chapter’ of the film is marked by a title card declaring ‘the truth according to…’) and filling in some of the story gaps as it continues. Whilst this initially makes the first chapter (‘Jean’s truth’) seem a little scattershot and jumpy, it falls into place by the climax.

Scott’s penchant for placing the viewer firmly in place and time is fully on show here with some incredible scenery and interesting period detail. Fortunately though, the writing team of Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon drop in an occasional joke to lighten proceedings and whilst there’s some ‘olde-worlde movie language’ the script is sharp enough, and the performances strong enough, to not feel stuffy.

The three leads are astonishing: Damon shows huge variety as his character arguably changes the most between chapters. In his own he’s noble and gentle but degenerates to petty and vindictive in Le Gris’ tale and harsh and abusive in Marguerites. Adam Driver tows the line perfectly between smarm and charm but Jodie Comer is the MVP here who, like Damon, has to cover a huge range across the span of the story (which covers a number of years.)

There’s some meaty and brutal action beats but the core story is told so well, and is so horribly relatable, that it is hugely gripping in and of itself and the lengthy run time rushes by.

In our current society of muddled truth The Last Duel feels sadly poignant but its setting smartly enforces its moral through stealth. We may not treat sexual assault as a crime ‘against a man’s property’ as they do here or settle these cases with a fight to the death (where the woman is at risk of being burned alive for ‘not telling the truth in the eyes of God’) but we still have an all too familiar issue with truth being in the eye of the beholder, the course of justice being perverted by power and toxic male behaviour that might make you leave the cinema thinking we haven’t come as far as we’d like to think.

4 stars ****