In the Flesh: The Last Duel

The Last Duel opens with two knights at tilt, lances lowered, horses thundering over frozen earth. It’s a tense image, and Scott shoots it as though we’re riding hard on the heels of Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), clearly conveying the bone-shattering force with which the two riders are about to converge. The next time we see this same scene, over two hours later, that sense of tension and momentum has been transmuted into something truly nauseating. The life of de Carrouges’ wife Marguerite hangs in the balance of the contest, and should de Carrouges lose she will be publicly humiliated and burned alive. The preachiness that has weighed down so many of Scott’s other historical epics — I’m looking at you, Kingdom of Heaven — is here dialed back to a minimum, and even the heaviest-handed sequences of Marguerite and her mother-in-law Nicole (Harriet Walter) discussing the burdens of womanhood are held together by genuine, sometimes painful insight into the prices women pay to stay alive and keep what little freedom men allow them.

The film’s screenplay, written by Nicole Holofcener in collaboration with stars Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, is sharp, subtle, and remarkably well-informed as to the ins and outs of medieval morality. Its three-part structure is smartly observed and offers a thoroughly medieval perspective on the rape around which the film’s plot revolves Rashomon-style. When we step into the narrative of Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) we see not a blameless portrait of what we, the modern audience, might understand as courtly love but rather a form of rape which in its historical moment might well have been shrugged off as something Marguerite brought on herself by admiring Le Gris’ good looks. In Carrouges’ opening segment we see a dullard’s vision of himself as both war hero and loving husband. And then, as Scott opens the film’s final act and dives into Marguerite’s account, the film’s real heart comes into focus.

The rape is not the deciding moral issue at play in The Last Duel. When Marguerite confesses what she’s been through to Carrouge, his first instinct is to assault her. His second, once he’s accepted that his honor is at stake, is to rape her in turn so as to reassert his claim to her as his bride. By attempting to speak on her own behalf Marguerite only succeeds in placing herself between the egos and reputations of two different stripes of violent, entitled man, and when her husband pledges to duel Le Gris even knowing what his failure would mean for his wife it becomes plain that her story here is incidental, an afterthought attached to the heroic ballad he believes his life constitutes. Neither man has ever really known Marguerite, whose husband dickers over her dowry at the very altar of their wedding, whose rapist professes his love to her and then acts as though she reciprocates. So as the horses converge, as the lances come up and the camera rises and falls with the surging gait of the chargers, we see a woman’s life tossed heedlessly into the jaws of what amounts to simple chance, and understand the real spectacle the crowd desires isn’t bloodshed, but the thrill of watching such a coin flash as it turns in midair, not caring whether its result means death or absolution for the woman chained to her own pyre in mourning black, watching boys play war.