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Not like with different misfires of its magnitude, I can at the least see what The Final Duel was aiming for. The historic epic, primarily based on a real 14th-century occasion and directed by Ridley Scott, is a competently made, action-packed movie stuffed with lush feasts and bloody sword fights. What’s extra, it faucets into the zeitgeist — of the Twenty first century, not the 14th — with willpower and zeal.
Good intentions, nonetheless, don’t all the time yield good outcomes. The Final Duel is, in essence, a film a couple of lengthy custom: not believing girls once they say they’ve been raped or sexually assaulted. However the path the film takes to remind us of this sordid reality, tortuous by design, is about as refined as a thwack throughout the face with a damaged lance.
The Final Duel is Matt Damon’s brainchild, primarily based on Eric Jager’s 2005 nonfiction e book of the identical identify. After deciding to make the film with Scott, who directed Damon in 2015’s The Martian, Damon additionally introduced on his pal and longtime collaborator Ben Affleck to jot down the screenplay. The pair shortly realized that, given the subject material, they wished a feminine co-writer within the combine too. In order that they reached out to Nicole Holofcener, who’s written (and typically directed) films like Strolling and Speaking, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and Sufficient Stated. She signed on.
Jodie Comer in The Final Duel.
twentieth Century Studios
The story they inform could be very previous and far mentioned, each in its time and for hundreds of years after, as Jager famous in Lapham’s Quarterly final 12 months. It issues the case of Marguerite de Carrouges, a noblewoman who lived in Normandy within the 14th century. In 1386, she reported that, whereas her husband Sir Jean de Carrouges was touring, she was raped within the house of her mother-in-law by a squire named Jacques Le Gris. To settle his spouse’s accusation, Carrouges — after an attraction to the French king and a prolonged investigation by the Parlement (appellate courtroom) — challenged Le Gris to a duel to the dying.
It’s vital to notice two methods this period differed from ours. One is that as a result of girls had been thought of the authorized property of their husbands, Le Gris’s alleged crime was tried as an offense dedicated towards Carrouges, not his spouse, although she gave intensive testimony. The opposite is the 14th century’s widespread perception {that a} duel of this sort would actually reveal the innocence or guilt of each events. God, who knew the reality, would permit the harmless man to stay and the responsible man to die.
That perception raised the stakes of the duel even increased: If Carrouges died, Marguerite can be burned on the stake, since his dying would imply she had been mendacity all alongside.
This historic occasion furnishes the essential plot of The Final Duel, which takes its identify from the very fact (oddly not defined within the movie, until I used to be asleep on the wheel someplace) that the fight between Carrouges and Le Gris was the ultimate state-sanctioned duel in French historical past. Damon, sporting a medieval mullet and typically a sneer, performs Carrouges; his spouse Marguerite is portrayed by Jodie Comer, who’s taking over a tricky function. Adam Driver is a youthful, handsomer Le Gris who grows near the lads’s overlord, the bleach-blond Rely Pierre of Alençon (Affleck).
Historical past has served up a number of accounts of Marguerite’s ordeal, many (if not most) of them shaded by the concept she, being a girl, was both mistaken, silly, duped, or simply plain mendacity. Jager emphasised in his Lapham’s Quarterly article how ceaselessly this occurred. “A lot as Le Gris is alleged to have silenced Marguerite together with his hood,” he observes, “a legion of clerics, historians, and partisans managed to muffle and stifle her story with imprecise rumors and inconsistent experiences which have shrouded the matter nearly to the current day.”
With that in thoughts, a part of the aim of The Final Duel is to retell the story — the true story.
The filmmakers structured the story by looping again on it 3 times: first from Carrouge’s perspective, then Le Gris’s, and eventually from Marguerite’s. Affleck and Damon wrote the lads’s views, drawing on historic accounts, and Holofcener wrote Marguerite’s. (There are fewer historic first-person accounts from girls in that period, for apparent causes.) A lot of the storytelling is lighthearted, jokey, even goofy. Every circles again over the identical time interval, labeled on display as “The reality in keeping with” one of many characters. As Marguerite’s phase begins, her identify fades from the subtitles, leaving, for only a second, the phrases “The reality.”
Ben Affleck in The Final Duel.
twentieth Century Studios
The Final Duel argues that Marguerite’s model is the proper model. When her story is on display, we see some issues slightly bit in another way. Carrouges isn’t the jovial, doting husband he imagines himself to be; he’s chilly and even merciless, irrespective of how strenuously Marguerite goals to please him. An encounter between Le Gris and Marguerite that Le Gris remembers as flirtatious is, in Marguerite’s reminiscence, transient and chilly. The shifts are refined, however they’re there.
What doesn’t change (or modifications solely barely) is the precise rape, advised in each Le Gris and Marguerite’s accounts. Actually, it’s not advised a lot as noticed. The movie’s point-of-view conceit implies that we watch the several-minute-long rape scene twice, presumably to determine that each Le Gris and Marguerite skilled the identical actuality. Le Gris, nonetheless, maintains that their assembly was consensual; Marguerite says she was raped.
Via Twenty first-century eyes and ethics, Marguerite appears clearly proper. We see her scream, cry, and clearly resist, then lie devastated on the mattress after Le Gris has assaulted her — innovations of the filmmakers (who consulted advocacy organizations for sexual assault survivors, comparable to RAINN), however jarringly sensible. Solely a monster, having seen that, can be unsure about what occurred.
Le Gris maintains that he and Marguerite, attracted to at least one one other and crammed with lust, engaged in consensual intercourse; he additionally claims she protested at first, as befits a girl of her station. At finest, he’s the frat boy who rapes a woman after which says she was drunk and asking for it, or the one that claims the sufferer was merely being coy and really wished to have intercourse — each heinous actions. At worst, he’s additionally mendacity, abhorrently.
Coupled with some clanky, clunky strains explaining 14th-century ethics (does anybody actually must be advised girls had been thought of property again then?), the movie’s level is made: Historical past has been unhealthy to girls, and none of this cruelty is new. If The Final Duel typically will get slightly ham-fisted about its goals, nicely, that’s Hollywood. (Contemplate the road the place a cleric declares, “A rape can’t trigger being pregnant. That is simply science!” By some means, I doubt he stated it similar to that.)
However there’s greater, weirder factor occurring right here, which is that The Final Duel is a film, and what we’re watching is a girl being raped twice in nearly equivalent scenes that final a number of minutes. The scenes are doing narrative work, to make certain. However are there moral points to contemplate in asking an viewers to witness a rape, twice, in the midst of a movie that’s in any other case offered as a swashbuckling epic? Clearly, the filmmakers intend for viewers to study one thing by watching Marguerite’s story. However what’s the purpose of telling it on this method? And does it tie up the story in a too-neat bow?
Adam Driver and Matt Damon in The Final Duel.
twentieth Century Studios
Having seen The Final Duel, I can’t get round these questions. I can’t even actually reply them. One may argue that the distinction between the movie’s convivial feasts and bloody fights and the starkly critical rape is supposed to throw the latter into reduction, but it surely merely doesn’t learn as being that fastidiously thought of. Actually, the movie isn’t really focused on its titular duel — it’s so uninterested, it doesn’t level out that it was the final official duel in France, or why that will matter. I’m undecided the screenplay, as constructed, really is aware of what it’s making an attempt to say, or that its writers might convincingly defend its prolonged reconstruction of rape as merited by weighty, highly effective reasoning. It’s at pains to make us agree that the rape was unhealthy and that Marguerite was wronged, however that looks as if fairly low-hanging fruit.
Extra troubling to me is that, within the trend of many Hollywood interval movies, it additionally features as a head-shaking, mournful look again at historical past. “Weren’t they so backward again then?” it asks. “They didn’t even know that rape can lead to being pregnant! Ladies had been legally simply property!” However that framing provides viewers most in want of listening to the movie’s central argument — that little has modified in social attitudes towards rape victims — an exit route. Should you’re already inclined to suppose Me Too has gone too far, that ladies in the present day most likely overplay allegations of sexual assault, then The Final Duel provides a straightforward out. At the least, it’s simple to suppose, we’re not like them anymore.
The film The Final Duel most evokes is Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 crime movie Rashomon. Rashomon is a kind of films that comes up in any fundamental movie historical past course, so well-known that the unreliability of witnesses in courtroom testimony is known as the “Rashomon impact.” Rashomon tells the identical story from completely different views; it, too, is a couple of rape, and it additionally features a duel. The hyperlinks are apparent.
In Rashomon, a person is lifeless, and his spouse has been raped. Three individuals testify, and we see the occasions from every of their views — or we see what they every say occurred, at the least. First, the samurai who allegedly raped the girl and murdered her husband testifies, then the girl, then the murdered husband (via a medium). Every is mendacity in a roundabout way to guard themselves. We additionally hear from a fourth individual, a woodcutter, who says he noticed the occasions however by no means disclosed to the courtroom that he knew the reality, thus throwing his personal character into query.
The purpose of Rashomon is that eyewitness accounts, subjectivity, and fundamental human nature forestall any of us from ever understanding the complete reality about what occurred to another person, and that people have a tough time being trustworthy about who we actually are. (That everybody is proven to be mendacity might arguably make the echo of Rashomon’s construction in The Final Duel a bit ill-advised.) And, in truth, our lack of ability to ever see the complete image is why Jager’s account of the various methods male historians, clerics, and students have tried to clarify Marguerite’s story over centuries is so fascinating and infuriating. The true story, in some methods, isn’t solely concerning the bitter triumph of a girl who was wronged but in addition about how punishing and even murdering a rapist doesn’t erase his actions or their results. (Marguerite bore a baby who was possible Le Gris’s.)
The truth that Marguerite’s story didn’t finish with the duel, and even along with her peaceable later years, however quite with centuries of males arguing about whether or not she was ever actually raped within the first place, would have made for a way more provocative movie. As Jager explains in his Lapham’s article:
Historic scandals, very similar to the modern ones filling our tabloids, information websites, and now-ubiquitous Fb feeds, are constructed on a extensively shared sense of certainty about “what actually occurred” — a sense that usually belies the elusive reality. Whereas some touched by scandal might resurrect their lives and reputations, others by no means will: what occurred, or is alleged to have occurred, might comply with them even via the pages of historical past.
The lengthy tail of a scandal comparable to this, a criminal offense like this, and the vigorous assertions of those that are positive they know the reality is sobering and unsettling. (Sarcastically, The Final Duel’s model of occasions is essentially only one extra within the lengthy line of speculations.) Marguerite and Carrouges acquired justice, kind of. However the reality we’re nonetheless speaking about their story in the present day means the worst second in a single girl’s life has been relitigated lengthy, gone her dying. In that method, she’s loads like many ladies in the present day who’re raped; even once they win their case, the whispers proceed. Historical past is advised by the winners — besides when it’s not.
The Final Duel opens in theaters on October 15.
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