Movie/TV Show Reviews:

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  It's tempting to make a buckle out of "The Last Duel". After all, Ridley Scott began his career with a film about two gentlemen crossing steel and now, 44 years later, he returns to a similar topic. However, there will be no clamp, because the director has no intention of closing the filmography and already has several more projects up his sleeve. The juxtaposition of "The Last Duel" (2021) and "The Duel" (1977) shows how much both are films of their times. Despite his "artistic" visual pretensions, Scott has always been an audience-sensitive director. And while it's going all the way back to the Middle Ages this time, it's actually aiming straight at the zeitgeist. After all, The Duel embodied the cinema of the modernist mode: the literary prototype was a short story by Joseph Conrad, and the visual inspiration was the painting scale of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon. Of course, "modernist" meant "masculine" there: the woman played a corresponding supporting role, and the plot revolved around a pair of guys dueling at the length of their swords. "The Last Duel" significantly tones down these tendencies. Dariusz Wolski beautifully paints the presented world with the camera, but instead of Kubrick's chiaroscuro, we have a functional steel-gray Hollywood "realism". The story of two quarreling cockerels is enriched by a third, female perspective. The foundation of the plot is the true story of the last "judicial duel" that took place in France in 1386. Knight Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) has accused squire Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) of raping his wife, Marguerite (Jodie Comer). The gentlemen decided to settle the issue by ripping their guts out with sharp instruments. Today, they'd probably be throwing insults on Twitter, and Scott is targeting that analogy. The medieval costume makes it possible to sharpen the conflict significantly and raise the stakes (including the threat of literally burning Marguerite at the stake), but the topic is very current. When the accusations against Bill Cosby began to surface, one American newspaper published an ironic headline referring to the phrase "he said, she said". One sad "he" was contrasted there with an army of "she", illustrating the striking disparity between the "versions of truth" proclaimed by the accused and the accusers. However, Scott portrays the times when custom, science and power relations effectively tipped the scales to the other side and women could not talk about their harm, because one: it was not appropriate and two: no one would listen. The entire dramaturgical meat of The Last Duel thus comes from the starting trio, from the tension between three points of view: the husband, the wife and the third present their "truths", and the viewer must pass judgment. In a way, Scott filmed his own Rashomon here: we have three characters, three writers (Nicole Holofcener, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck) and three versions of the story. We also have three Ridley Scotts. There's an artisan who spins the story in a politely dull Hollywood zero-mode. He is a visionary who is more interested in the meticulous staging of the depicted world than the content: filming armor, mud and castle corridors. Finally, there's the quasi-feminist, the one from Ripley, Thelma and Louise, or G.I.Jane: a guy who tries to explore the female point of view. Unfortunately, the three Scotts get in each other's way. The first run through history - in de Carrouge's version - is therefore Hollywood boring, just like the knight played by Matt Damon. The grandiose sequences of battles and other horse riding delight the eye, but at the same time they slow down the course of history, unnecessarily inflating the film to two and a half hours. And the (well-intentioned) decision to point out which version of the truth is truer undermines the concept of "rahomonity" somewhat. Scott wouldn't have to lead the viewer by the hand, because he has actors who do it themselves - much more subtly, without putting a big dot on the i. Sure, Ben Affleck as the head of the feuding knights balances on a strange border between intended and unintentional ridiculousness. But already Damon interestingly shades his character depending on which version we watch him in. He smoothly transitions from the figure of an unjustly wronged bore to the figure of a self-righteous buffoon, remaining believable as still the same figure, only seen from different angles. Jodie Comer, on the other hand, bravely fights the trap of playing the role of a good, noble and well-read lady. She is, after all, the emotional anchor in this tangle of conflicting interests. In many ways, this is her film.

  12/20/2022