Knight court
‘The Last Duel’ great for fans of Driver, Damon & medieval eye candy
Serving up medieval eye candy like mad, some of it ghastly, Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel” is a piece of historical fiction, based on the real-life tale of Jean de Carrouges of Normandy (Matt Damon), a 14th century warrior knight for the young King Charles VI (Alex Lawther). De Carrouges, along with his wife Marguerite (Jodie Comer), brought a charge of rape against their neighbor and onetime friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver).
The film begins with snippets of the climactic duel (cue thunderhoofed jousting), which we will see repeated three times, the same goes for the reputed crime itself. “The Last Duel” then backtracks to events before the duel, including the Battle of Limoges. It ends with the duel’s bloody completion. Although the characters are French, the film is in English with songs sung in French.
Sporting a nasty Gallic mullet, Damon’s Jean de Carrouges is an illiterate brute with a heavily scarred face, but a courageous warrior with a strong sense of being
wronged by his overlord, Count Pierre d’Alencon (Ben Affleck in a blonde ’do with matching goatee, speaking in an effete accent). The count favors the handsome, young Le Gris over the churlish de Carrouges. Pierre is the Mick Jagger of his times, complete with nightly orgies.
Sometime after the Battle of Limoges, de Carrouges, whose previous wife and child died, meets and marries Marguerite de Thibouville, whose father once sided with the English King, bringing the family into disrepute. Buried beneath a heavy profusion of flaxen hair extensions and wigs and ugly 14th century schmattes, Comer has a hard time making much out of Marguerite, who is depicted as a relatively learned and refined woman for her time and is at first unable to give the uncouth de Carrouges the heir for which he yearns. It is made clear to us that sexual intercourse with de Carrouges is painful for Marguerite. She is often left alone at the de Carrouges’ fortress with her miserable mother-in-law (Harriet Walter) while her husband is off to war.
More than anything else, “The Last Duel, which was co-written by Nicole Holofcener (“Enough Said”) and Academy Award-winning writers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (“Good Will Hunting”), resembles Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 classic “Rashomon” with its competing narratives, concerning the rape of the wife of a samurai, including one version of the event rendered by the samurai’s ghost. De Carrouges is often called to Paris, where the recently fire-ravaged Notre Dame commands the cityscape.
“The Last Duel” is full of blazing hearths and forests of bright candles. The randy Pierre remarks, “Life is good,” echoing, the “It’s good to be the king,” line from Mel Brooks’ “History of the World, Part 1.” Pierre will also greet Le Gris with the words, “Come in. Take your pants off.” You half expect to hear John Williams’ Darth Vader theme as Driver strides about in high dudgeon. In one scene, Driver kisses a horse, and the animal’s reaction is comical.
At the risk of a terrible death, Marguerite says she will not be silent. But I am not sure if the occasionally Python-esque film is intended as a woke fable or a horse of a different color. The repetitions did not yield much insight to me, and, outside of a deadly stab, “The Last Duel” never quite makes its point.
(“The Last Duel” contains extreme violence, sexual assault, sexual content, nudity and profanity.)