Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, a film that’s not only set during the Hundred Years’ War and turns on an abstruse question of jurisprudence, but also features multiple Rashomon-esque takes on an inciting event and a blond Ben Affleck chewing scenery with Klaus Kinski-like gusto, might sound doomed to failure. But against all odds, it turns out to be a smartly acted and insightfully written look at how the intersection of power, greed, superstition, and vanity can warp and obscure even the most brutally obvious crime.
Based on the last judicial duel permitted by the Parliament of Paris in 1386, The Last Duel starts with a scene familiar from so many films set in medieval times: nobles cheering on two mounted knights as they charge at each other, their lances aiming for the kill. But the flashback that spools to years earlier and builds up to that climactic clash doesn’t play to the expected tropes of honor and sacrifice. The duel itself was no ordinary jousting tournament but an actual trial in which the verdict is determined by the outcome of the fight.
This duel involved one knight, Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), whose wife, Marguerite (Jodie Comer), accused another knight, Jean’s onetime friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), of raping her. According to the legal reasoning at the time—which the film presents in a hearing that takes place right before the duel—if Jean lost to Jacques, that would prove Marguerite’s charge to be false and result in her being burned alive. And in case that prospect isn’t horrifying enough, a court official (Željko Ivanek) coolly informs Marguerite during the hearing that most convicts burn for 20 to 30 minutes before expiring.
Written by Affleck, Damon, and Nicole Holofcener, the film’s screenplay refracts the story behind the duel through the three main characters’ individual perspectives, stacked one after the other like witness testimony in a trial. The at-times subtle shifts in point of view are astutely communicated by Damon, Driver, and Comer, each of whom grippingly brings true depth to what could have easily turned into caricature. Driver in particular pulls us in with his quick-witted charm while also hinting at the emptiness that lies behind it.
The men’s stories cover much the same ground, tracking the pair’s diverging paths and strained camaraderie as they fight to make a name for themselves in a chaotic, poor, plague-infested, and war-torn France where survival even for the nobility is often contingent on the whims of a feckless lord. The differences between the varying perspectives are mostly of perception. In Jean’s version, he’s a noble knight humiliated and stolen from by Jacques and his similarly arrogant count, Pierre d’Alençon (Affleck). In Jacques’s version, Jean is a decent but clueless dullard who doesn’t deserve the gorgeous and well-read Marguerite, who, to Jacques at least, seems so smitten with his dashing erudition and bedroom smolder that even if she says no to his advances, he’s convinced that that isn’t what she means.
It’s Marguerite’s story that reveals just how little either of the two men truly see anything of her besides a reflection of themselves. Once the audience hears her side, Jean’s tale of battles on and off the field of combat appears less chivalrous than it is self-pitying, while Jacques’s ribald wining and womanizing in Pierre’s court looks more predatory than fun-seeking.
The stark differences between Marguerite’s and Jacques’s stories are the ones that matter in the his-word-against-hers debate that the duel is meant to settle. The film introduces some variances in how earlier scenes are depicted in each of the subsequent accounts. Jacques’s version of events includes many steamy looks from Marguerite and lengthy chatter in which she and Jacques drop literary references and slip into fluent German. While in her version she admires his looks, it’s primarily from afar, with no flirtatious badinage, suggesting that the moment either never happened or was expanded in Jacques’s mind as a pretextual excuse. But even though there are moments of potentially unreliable narration, the film takes a less ambiguous point of view when it comes to whether or not Marguerite was raped.
The Last Duel can be a slog at times, given the storyline’s repetition and the gratuitously bone-cracking, blood-spurting battle scenes that Scott has become known for. Even so, this is the rare Scott film that mostly downplays spectacle in favor of unrushed and well-observed interpersonal drama. The Last Duel also, for better and worse, leaves plenty of room for Affleck, an odd outlier in a mostly serious-minded work about a historical curiosity. What the actor does here, as the playboy count who empowers Jacques’s entitlement and feeds Jean’s sense of victimization through bullying, can only be described as hamming it up like a decadently bored, wine-swilling, castle-dwelling David Bowie stuck in the 14th century. The performance doesn’t quite belong, but as a directorial misstep it’s relatively minor and doesn’t detract from a saga that revels in the complexities of its competing storylines.
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