Men hacking at each other with swords in front of a baying crowd and a capricious ruler in a Ridley Scott period movie. Sounds familiar, right? And sure enough, there are moments in The Last Duel that do call Gladiator to mind – especially in the crunching battle scenes that decorate the first half of the film in interesting shades of blood and gristle.
But this bleak, wintry retelling of a real historical episode in fourteenth-century Normandy is nothing like as satisfying as that Ancient Rome epic.
At the heart of its storm of vain, egotistical and abusive men is Jodie Comer’s smart, courageous noblewoman, Lady Marguerite de Carrouges, whose honour has been compromised at the hands of scheming Jacques LeGris (Adam Driver) leads her husband, lunkish warrior Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), to challenge him to France’s last officially sanctioned duel.
Adapted loosely from Eric Jager’s ‘The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France’, it opens with the first exchanges of the duel – a little chainmailed ankle meant to draw in an audience about to be plunged back in time to investigate its thorny causes.
Intriguingly, The Last Duel frames its story in three chapters and through the prism of the three characters’ recollections. This Rashomon-splaining yields intriguing variants in narrative viewpoints but few surprises. There are tiny divergences to look out for: in his wife’s memory, Jean grows a beard that is absent from his recollections. Even the cold he brings home from a ruinous campaign in Scotland varies in severity, depending on whose version we’re watching. (Tellingly, even in his own account of events no one seems to like Jean that much.)
Rendered in wintry blues and greys by cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, it’s a typically impressive feat of world-building from Scott full of imposing castles and lovely swashes of countryside. But it’s a film with a grimace on its face, and what levity Damon and Affleck’s first script together since Good Will Hunting delivers comes mainly via Affleck’s Count Pierre tormenting the impulsive, angry Jean at every turn. Alex Lawther also has fun as King Charles VI, who presides over the later legal wranglings with eye-rolling archness
But Nicole Holofocener, an accomplished filmmaker in her own right, has a co-writer credit too, and it’s tempting to think that she spent a chunk of the process trying to bring a little finesse to all these scenes of men litigating their beefs in front of other crowds of other men.
The third (and inevitably strongest) chapter is supercharged with a mute fury. Comer is mesmerising when she’s finally foregrounded and is the most watchable thing on screen even when she isn’t.
The Last Duel is out in cinemas across Riyadh from Thursday October 14.
