To be fair, The Last Duel doesn't attempt to have it any other way. There are three chapters in this 150-minute film about the last legal duel to the death in France, each titled "The Truth according to..." depending on which one of the three leads is the focus. The first is Matt Damon's Jean De Carrouges, an old plodder who's good at surviving battles and not a whole lot else, which is a problem because his local ruler, Count Pierre d'Alençon (Ben Affleck) likes winners and partying.
His version of events presents De Carrouges as basically a decent guy in a rough-hewn fashion who gets in a bunch of battles but finds himself slowly pushed to the outer because of a lack of social skills. Unfortunately for him, his friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) has the social skills to pay the bills - literally, as he becomes the Count's tax collector and close confidant.
The once close friends become estranged, which it's easy to imagine adding a layer of tragedy to proceedings if it was about literally anything else but a woman being raped. Said woman being De Carrouges' wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer), who is easily the most interesting character in this film - but we have a way to go to get her yet.
Le Gris' version of events paints himself in a better light, as you'd expect. It also gives us a lot more of The Count swanning around in a 14th century gold tracksuit while hosting orgies (easily the best part of the film), while making it clear that De Carrouges is a brute with no class. There's also plenty of Le Gris going on about how he's in love with Marguerite and can't live without her, which almost certainly would have landed very differently in a version of this film made 20 years ago.
Both men's versions have Marguerite first privately then publicly claiming she was raped by Le Gris, which eventually leads to the duel that opens and closes this film. De Carrouges's take has him believing her out of his love; Le Gris's version is that she wanted it and all her protests were merely to save her dignity. When we finally get her version - her chapter opens the same as the others, only when the other words fade from the screen "the truth" lingers - neither version is shown to be correct.
This kind of film is usually designed to send audiences out of the cinema arguing amongst themselves about which characters they believe and whether justice was served. The Last Duel makes it clear: Marguerite's version is the truth. So why bother with the others? Who cares what a rapist and a brutish, disengaged husband thinks?
Obviously everyone in 14th century France for starters, but Ridley Scott fails to bring to the screen any real sense or understanding of medieval life beyond the superficial. The reason for three versions of the one story is to give us three versions of medieval life, but for all Scott's skill at presenting the surface trappings there's rarely much of a sense here of what life was actually like - a fatal flaw in a film that's a social drama that hinges on highlighting both the differences and similarities between that time and ours.
This window into the past is murky at best, full of modern language and cliches (the King is a giggling fool, priests are sinister, women are gossipy backstabbers, mothers-in-law are nasty, etc), only rarely hinting at just how different the world of 600-odd years ago was. The point is clearly to make a medieval #metoo movie to show how little has changed - many of the court details and references to abusive priests leading up to the duel could come from a film set today - but without first establishing how different things also were, the similarities just seem obvious and lazy.
Unwilling to make this a clear-cut tale of good versus evil, and unable to present the central events with any real level of ambiguity, all that's left is a repetitive study of an ugly, petty time where thugs and fools ruled and love was just an excuse for crime. Which might have worked if there was any kind of animating spirit underneath it all: while all three leads give decent performances, they rarely connect with each other, giving only glimpses of the grand passions that supposedly are driving them.
On the plus side, the duel itself is thrilling film making and brutal viewing, especially if you don't already know who's going to win. Scott remains a vivid, powerful director - just so long as nobody has to speak.
- Anthony Morris
