"The Last Duel" Battles With The Patriarchy - And Loses

Ridley Scott and his white superstars prove the quest for gender equality has a long way to go.

May 1, 2022

On September 9, 2018, 820,000 people watched the premiere of Lifetime’s adaptation of Caroline Kepnes’ book about an aspiring writer in a romance with a troubled bookstore owner. While nice to look at, there were no shocks or cutting social commentaries in that initial hour, leaving the world to ask one question:

“Is that the dude from Easy A?”

Yes. Yes it was.

It was the beginning of a cultural phenomenon, where Penn Badgley’s Joe traversed a self-made mess of bodies and creepy attempts at infiltrating the life of Guinevere Beck, playing white knight to her damsel in distress. Her struggles were typical, but supremely inflated in Joe’s disturbed mind. The show’s devotion to his perspective sent shockwaves through the #MeToo movement by posing a question, one much more important than whether we were looking at the hot guy in the woodchuck costume who drove Emma Stone around on a lawnmower: are we full of it?

Scores of people took to the Internet in the wake of You’s first season to lament the lack of a Joe in their life: a man devoted exclusively to their happiness who readily moves mountains, and sometimes life itself, to secure it. His methods were unorthodox (and illegal), but the intent is what mattered. Of course, Beck eventually exposes the selfishness of his actions: we finally get her perspective on everything, and accept that there is no rationalization for Joe’s many wrongdoings. In the #MeToo era, that shouldn’t have been possible. Joe shouldn’t have been a sympathetic hero coveted by women around the world, praised as a hunky life cleanser detoxing Beck’s life, but he was. If there’s a movie version of that person, lusting after a psychotic murderer exploiting female vulnerability for wish fulfillment while simultaneously preaching justice for women, The Last Duel is that movie.

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Sir Jean de Carrouges (a miscast Matt Damon) is a French knight and friend of Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver). Jean marries Marguerite de Thibouville (Jodie Comer) for the large dowry offered by her father, including a large plot of land. When Le Gris, favored by overlord Pierre d'Alençon (Ben Affleck), is given the land instead, a rivalry forms, culminating in Le Gris’ rape of Marguerite, setting off a quest for justice shown in three chapters, each one devoted to the perspective of one of the three protagonists.

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Its aesthetic is suitably dreary, and Ridley Scott’s direction is steady, but it lacks the life to set it apart from the social commentary dramas that get churned out year after year, a particularly damning fact considering the $100 million budget. The screenplay is so desperate to evoke medieval times that it doesn’t trust the artists interpreting it to do that for them. The dialogue struggles to capture the vernacular: it feels more like a stilted creative writing assignment than a legitimate script.

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But The Last Duel isn’t intended as a visual showcase, or even a narrative one. Its true purpose is to slam our patriarchal society, run by powerful men and a general mindset that forces women through traumas that will never see a consequence. We question their integrity. We make demands of their sexual propriety. We insist they meet standards the men who violate them do not meet themselves. Unfortunately, Marguerite's perspective, while sympathetic, is too cartoonish in contrast to Jean's and Le Gris' to be powerful. Jean’s return is not heroic in her account as it is in his. He doesn’t extend a gentle hand and understanding, but levels her with distrust and coerces her into a sexual encounter. There is truth there. We pollute our accounting of things with self-serving revisionism, lacing our misdeeds with a sense of honor rooted in simple misunderstandings. Le Gris’ assault was not rape, but a mutually-coveted liaison that only appeared suspect due to feminine convention: it is womanly nature to object. She must, after all, maintain a veneer of virtue, if not virtue itself. She had to voice objection to appear pure, but inside every woman is a ravenous beast aching for a man’s physical liberation.

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It’s intelligent in its choppy presentation, giving us perspective through the lens of our own delusion, as each man’s account is derived solely from what they’re willing to see and believe. Jean feels Le Gris should be indebted to him for saving his life on the battlefield, but Le Gris’ account calls into question whether that happened at all, painting him as the life-saving hero instead. It cuts not long after Le Gris pitifully thanks Jean for saving him in Jean’s chapter and immediately after Le Gris saves Jean’s life in his. Jean, imagining himself the conquering hero cleansing the world of dishonor and supporting his woman with financial security and unconditional love, is in actuality a petulant misogynist, whining about the various entitlements that have been stolen from him and confusing oppression with protection. In his mind, he bears Marguerite genuine affection that he displays in great earnest. In hers, he’s cold and distant: the marriage is a loveless union filled with zero physical or emotional reciprocity.

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Yes, we modify our perspective after the fact to cushion the blow. Yes, we’re always the hero of our own story, constantly shifting our perceptions of morality and those around us to fit our narrative. Yes, we evade accountability by gaslighting the other party, dismissing their feelings as a misunderstanding. In real life, hearing about the consequences of these lies and delusions is powerful. In film, it feels lazy. In fairness, Marguerite’s chapter is not histrionic in relaying its message. What happens to her is handled as though it were ordinary. It's traumatic and horrifying, but not in a way that feels disingenuous, as though we need the facts laid bare for us in neon lights. It’s easy for Le Gris to enter the home, corner her in her room, and rape her on the bed. It’s easy for Jean to question his wife’s honor, take more issue with her physical acknowledgment of Le Gris than what happened to her, and demand she sleep with him to compensate for her assault. We aren’t as judicially archaic today, but our sentiments are still outdated. Four years after Harvey Weinstein got exposed as a serial rapist exploiting his power to assault vulnerable young women, a movie like this needs to do more than state the obvious to make an impact.

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How long will we congratulate ourselves for placing a Bandaid on a bullet wound? How long will we pat ourselves on the back for embracing objective morality? Rape is wrong; not believing women is wrong; and as The Last Duel tells us, fighting for justice as we shuffle our feet to keep under the spotlight of public praise is wrong. Marguerite knows it’s not love for her that fuels Jean’s vengeful fire. He cares only for his ego. There are a few moments where the movie knows it should reach for more. Jean’s mother, a rape victim herself, chastises Marguerite’s selfishness in sacrificing her husband to seek justice. Marguerite insists what happened to her demands that justice: her rape wasn’t right. Her mother-in-law answers:

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“There is no right. There is only the power of men.”

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Is this it? Is this all the movie has to offer? The same subversion that made You’s first season so brilliant is absent here: our perspective should get challenged. Show Le Gris’ perspective first. Paint him as a sympathetic figure wronged by a temperamental friend refusing to see reason; show him as a good-natured man intent on doing right by others dealing with the same medieval politics as everyone else. When you’ve made him a fully realized person, when you’ve forced his perspective to be our perspective, then challenge us and see what our words are worth.

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But this is not the way of the world. We don’t like to be challenged. We don’t want to see what our words are worth. We want to believe they’re worth something simply because we speak them, and rely on occasional results to prove us right; it’s why critics have fawned over the film and why Marguerite’s character, and her perspective, are afterthoughts. We’ve made progress. R. Kelly got convicted, Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby as well. The reckoning came, but to the tune of some women finally getting justice while millions more still seek it, and an open ear that prioritizes their suffering over what the person attached to that ear wants to be true. ‍

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The Last Duel, though it behaves to the contrary, is satisfied with this. It doesn’t demand that the quest for justice continue. It doesn’t demand that we look at ourselves and ask if we’re more exploitative in our support for victims than sincere in seeking justice. It doesn’t make us look at ourselves and accept that the only thing that forced this issue to the forefront was the sweeping nature of its surge into the national consciousness. It doesn’t undermine our sense of righteousness like You did. It wasn’t our morals or some objective ethical standard: it was us, our hubris, our desire for ethical superiority. As a medieval drama, The Last Duel is occasionally impactful, but as a repudiation of the patriarchy, a monument to the #MeToo movement, it’s self-congratulatory over something accomplished only in a vacuum. The patriarchy isn’t some arbitrary construct: it’s composed of people, and people collectively have to learn and accept our part: me, them, and… you.