2021, d. Ridley Scott - rental
I'm not sure I ever got over three American actors performing as Frenchmen with vaguely British-ish accents. The occasional jeer from the crowd in French or the minstrel singing his campfire song in French only further exacerbated how weird it all was.
I'm also not sure octogenarian Ridley Scott was necessarily the right person to handle the delicateness of commenting on rape and gender politics in an oppressively patriarchal society. He kind of goes at it with a blunt hammer, seemingly more interested in the dick measuring contests more than the emotional gravity. Presenting it basically as "Ridley Scott's Rashomon", and it's kind of in spite of his own impulses (and a credit to the script) that it actually succeeds at making any sort of commentary or allusions to regressive ideas about assault or women's issues still present in modern day.
The first version told from the perspective of Jean de Carrouges (Damon) paints himself as the victim repeatedly, without ever finding fault in himself. The second finds Jacques Le Gris (Driver) obliviously viewing himself as the consummate frat boy in the ultimate boys' club where the world bends around him, and that he doesn't just deserve what he takes, but that it's owed to him. The final segment comes from Margueite de Carrouges, who is married off to Jacques by her disgraced father and lives under the simmering cruelty of her somewhat inept husband and his mother, only to be raped by Le Gris and then having to go through a gauntlet of confession and cross-examination before justice is left up to two men in a fight to the death where the "winner" is a result of "God's will" and therefore must be the truth.
In the end, the winner of the brutal and fierce duel (very well constructed and shot, as opposed to Scott's shaky-cam, Gladiator-style, war battles earlier in the film) is victorious and heralded but it's not at all about justice or truth, just spectacle. Nobody watching, not the king nor the court nor the spectators nor even the victor himself really cares about the truth nor the crime itself (which is much more about the injury to another man's "property", not so much the assault upon another person). The triumphant end feels so hollow. There's nothing to celebrate, but I can't tell whether Scott knows that or not, so caught up in the revelry this film is.
It's flawed, but still a tremendously engaging film.
Everything you mentioned is why I didn't watch this flick as soon as I downloaded it, despite it being right down my alley. In a world where we are finally getting past the idea of using rape as motivators for male characters to do things to each other, usually under the veil of honour, that Scott would do this movie surprised me. I hoped he was going to actually put that trope on trial rather than just use it again.
ReplyDeleteIn a way it does, but it's all the script (from Damon, Affleck and Nicole Holofcener)and not so much the director's interest.
ReplyDeleteI think Scott's primary interest was more the Roshaman storytelling and the brutal fight sequences and not so much presenting any deeper commentary on assault.
It's unfair for me to compare them, as they do have very different objectives as media, but I'm in the middle of watching the 4-part doc We Need To Talk About Cosby,a biography that celebrates (to an extent) Cosby's groundbreaking career, but also reframes it in the context of a serial predator who crafted and used his image to advance his ability to assault women.
It really examines societal structures and contextualizes the eras, where the Last Duel only seems to consider these as afterthought (though they are present)
I think you would like the movie though.. I am being hard on it but it's a very engaging movie