The Last Duel (2021)

Official trailer

The Last Duel is Ridley Scott’s 2021 American historical drama adapting Eric Jager’s 2004 nonfiction book of the same name. The film depicts the 1386 trial by combat between Norman knight Jean de Carrouges and squire Jacques Le Gris over Carrouges’s wife Marguerite’s accusation that Le Gris raped her. It employs Rashomon-style structure depicting the events three times from the perspectives of Carrouges, Le Gris, and Marguerite. The combat itself was the last legally sanctioned trial by combat in French history. Matt Damon plays Jean de Carrouges.

Adam Driver plays Jacques Le Gris. Jodie Comer plays Marguerite de Carrouges.

Ben Affleck plays Count Pierre d’Alencon. Harriet Walter plays Carrouges’s mother Nicole. Alex Lawther plays King Charles VI. Marton Csokas plays Crespin. Nicole Holofcener, Ben Affleck, and Matt Damon wrote the screenplay. 20th Century Studios produced the film on a budget of approximately 100 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 30 million dollars worldwide.

I found The Last Duel gripping and hard to sit through, in the way it should be. Scott tells the same story three times, and the third telling is the reason the film exists, because it made me go back over everything I’d been shown and see it differently. My reservation is how long the first two tellings take to get where they’re going, and that’s what holds it at an 8 for me.

Ridley Scott made his most serious late-career medieval production with The Last Duel, one of the more thoughtful Hollywood treatments of medieval sexual violence.

The triple-perspective Rashomon structure gives the events three distinct treatments before the final combat resolves the immediate question of who survives. The Marguerite perspective addresses the historical record’s documentation of how ecclesiastical and royal authorities treated medieval women’s testimony.

The material reflects real historical research while the dramatic compression makes particular events accessible to general audiences.

The Rashomon Structure

Scott constructs the film through three sequential perspectives that depict the same events from different viewpoints.

The Carrouges perspective shows him as honorable knight whose rival has violated his wife. The Le Gris perspective shows him as sophisticated nobleman whose seduction Marguerite eventually invited. The Marguerite perspective shows her as woman whose testimony everyone around her, including her own husband, has disbelieved.

The Rashomon technique addresses how medieval courts adjudicated sexual violence. The film proves that medieval women’s accounts of rape were typically subordinated to men’s interpretations of events. Marguerite’s perspective receives explicit confirmation as truth through the title card stating The truth according to Lady Marguerite de Carrouges. The film thus takes a position on the contested historical events instead of presenting all three perspectives as equally valid. That choice distinguishes the film from Kurosawa’s original Rashomon (1950), which refused to declare which account was true.

I think that title card is the boldest choice in the film. Plenty of directors would have hidden behind ambiguity, and Scott plants a flag. When those words came up on screen, the whole film snapped into focus for me.

The Trial by Combat

The trial by combat is the final resolution mechanism that medieval ecclesiastical and royal courts couldn’t provide.

The courts couldn’t resolve the Carrouges accusation through testimony because the case became he-said-she-said dispute. Medieval law permitted trial by combat as final appeal when other resolution methods failed. The combatants would fight to death. Divine judgment would deem the winner’s claim truthful. Marguerite would be executed if Carrouges lost on the theory that her false testimony had caused his death.

The system gave Marguerite no meaningful agency in the resolution.

She couldn’t testify directly, she couldn’t benefit from any outcome except her husband’s victory, and she’d die if he died. The material captures actual medieval legal practice that constrained women’s options severely, and it shows a system that produced violence while pretending it was divine judgment. It made me furious on her behalf, and the duel works because by the time it starts, I cared more about her life than about which man won.

Comer as Marguerite

Jodie Comer plays Marguerite with the controlled intelligence the role requires. Marguerite must work within the constraints while preserving her own knowledge of what occurred. The performance plays repeated humiliation, institutional disbelief, and physical violation while preserving the character’s underlying conviction that her account remains true regardless of who chooses to believe it.

Comer had made her name on the Killing Eve television series before The Last Duel, and this film gave her serious dramatic material on the big screen. I think she’s the best thing in it. Damon and Driver are playing men who believe their own versions of events, and Comer has the harder job of playing the truth while nobody around her will listen.

Is The Last Duel worth watching?

Of all Ridley Scott’s late-career pictures, The Last Duel is one of the strongest. The three-part structure takes a side through that title card, the trial by combat shows a legal system built to ignore a woman, and Jodie Comer holds the film together with controlled intelligence.

It stays at an 8 because the first two versions drag before the third pays them off. It lost money against a large budget, and I think it deserved a far bigger audience than it found.

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