The Last Duel

The most interesting thing here is not discovering who handles a sword better, but watching the same reality change depending on who remembers it. Ridley Scott divides the story into different perspectives and uses small variations in gestures, words and attitudes to reveal something deeply uncomfortable: almost everyone is capable of constructing a version of themselves in which they appear better than they really are. The Last Duel initially seems like a medieval story about honor and rivalry, but it gradually becomes clear that its true center lies somewhere else.
Jean de Carrouges sees himself as honorable, courageous and repeatedly wronged. Jacques Le Gris views himself as cultured, seductive and reasonable. What is fascinating is that neither self-image needs to be entirely invented in order to be misleading. Matt Damon and Adam Driver play precisely that gap between who each man believes himself to be and how others may perceive him. Ben Affleck, meanwhile, turns Pierre d'Alençon into the most blatant expression of a male world in which power, privilege and amusement constantly seem to matter more than consequences.
But when Marguerite finally occupies the center, everything we have previously seen takes on another dimension. Jodie Comer is extraordinary because she needs no grand speeches to show how completely she is surrounded by men who constantly talk about honor while rarely asking what she wants. Behaviors that might previously have appeared protective, romantic or even admirable suddenly acquire a far less pleasant meaning. The film stops treating her as a piece in a conflict between two men and begins looking at her as a person.
That is also where the film's harshness lies. It never uses the Middle Ages as an excuse to relativize violence or suggest that certain behavior was acceptable simply because it belonged to another era. Instead, it depicts a society in which a woman's body, voice and even suffering can be subordinated to male honor, property and reputation. What is truly disturbing is how recognizable some of those mechanisms remain: doubting the person who speaks out, examining her behavior and asking what she did before concentrating on what was done to her.
Scott reconstructs this world with remarkable physicality. Mud, cold, stone, horses, bodies and armor make medieval France feel unpleasantly tangible. Personally, this entire method of fighting while covered in metal seems almost absurd to me: men barely able to move inside enormously heavy structures while attempting to kill one another. Yet even that clumsy brutality fits the film's world, a society in which personal conflicts can become public demonstrations of force because violence itself has been accepted as a way of establishing truth.
The three-perspective structure demands patience, and some repeated scenes can feel redundant, but the repetition makes sense to me because we are never really watching exactly the same thing. Who controls a conversation changes, a glance takes on a different meaning, and someone's self-perceived honor begins to look increasingly like arrogance. Ridley Scott uses a large-scale historical drama to explore something much more intimate: the gap between the stories we tell about ourselves and the experience of the people who had to endure us.
It may look like a medieval film about knights, wars and honor, but what ultimately interested me most was how thoroughly it dismantles that masculine mythology. Behind the titles, armor and codes of honor stands a woman whose voice must compete with institutions, prejudice and men convinced that they understand her own experience better than she does. Visually powerful, extremely harsh at times and anchored by a superb Jodie Comer, The Last Duel proves that a centuries-old story can still feel uncomfortably close.