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Ridley Scott offers his own Rashomon with the star-studded period piece The Last Duel - The A.V. Club

Ridley Scott offers his own Rashomon with the star-studded period piece The Last Duel - The A.V. Club

Ridley Scott offers his own Rashomon with the star-studded period piece The Last Duel - The A.V. Club
Oct 12, 2021 1 min, 32 secs

That year, Norman knight Jean de Carrouges challenged his one-time friend, the squire Jacques Le Gris, to trial by combat.

Carrouges’ wife, Marguerite, had accused Le Gris of rape the previous January.

Jodie Comer, Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Ben Affleck, Alex Lawther.

Introduced fighting side by side, Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Le Gris (Adam Driver) are fast friends whose bond is tested and ultimately broken by a series of disputes involving contested property, an expected captaincy, and the favor of the count Pierre d’Alençon (Ben Affleck), cousin of the king.

The three novelly divided writing duties by character, and their story into three competing, overlapping narratives: “The truth according to” Carrouges, Le Gris, and, finally, Marguerite.

That range is most obvious with Damon, who projects a kind of aggrieved nobility in the first chapter (told, naturally, from Carrouges’ point of view), only to become embarrassingly impotent and finally coldly distant as the lens of perspective changes.

Damon, Affleck, and Holofcener save Marguerite’s perspective for last, in part so it can function like a damning rejoinder to the chapters before it—the woman’s side of the story, finally presented after two hours of the men’s blinkered sides

Yet that choice leaves Comer a little dramatically adrift: While Damon and Driver are gifted complicated (if ultimately unsympathetic) characters, she’s strategically denied much dimension until the home stretch—and by then, the film is focused almost entirely on her bravery as a victim stuck in a system stacked against her

The movie struggles as much as Carrouges and Le Gris do to really see Marguerite, at least outside the context of her ordeal

Scott, of course, eventually delivers the eponymous duel, and it’s as tense as it is grimly violent, with stakes far greater than which of these flawed men will emerge with his head and ego intact

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