The last duel: When the male ego does not let go – Film and Television – PRAVDA.sk

Director Ridley Scott is best known as the father of horror science fiction with his Intruder. Last year he came up with the exceptional series Raising Wolves, in which he presented a picture of a dystopian future in which there is a struggle between atheists and believers.

The main actors in the story are two androids who take care of a group of children on a remote planet. This year, Scott comes to theaters with something new.

The magnificent historical drama The Last Duel, based on the novel of the same name by Eric Jager, takes us to the environment of medieval France, where two men stand against each other, whose irreparable pride forces them to risk everything.

A good man and a villain?

The main roles are Matt Damon as Jean de Carrouges and Adam Driver as Jacques Le Gris, two best friends who have had several fights side by side. These are two diametrically opposed characters – while de Carrouges is a man of action who thinks simpler but goes hard on his own, Le Gris uses his five-legged nature and clever ingenuity to get to everything he desires in an easy way. .

In this way, the viewer is led to consider one as good and the other as bad. Le Gris gradually deprives de Carrouges of property and respect, and he is unable to accept it. On the one hand, there is friendship, which, however, is not broken down in depth, and therefore it is difficult for the viewer to understand what actually makes them best friends. On the other hand, there is pride that neither of them can swallow.

Both characters represent a beautiful parallel to how the world worked then and how it works to this day. In the figure of the young King Charles VI. it is visible how bored he is with a life in which he has already achieved absolutely everything and has no more surprises. Count Pierre, played by Ben Affleck, is incredibly playful, and Le Gris is his favorite, as he keeps coming up with new ways to entertain him and nods at everything he is told.

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However, the most interesting moment of the whole film is its last section. The story is divided into several parts, which show the events from the perspective of the main actors. In the end, we see how things happened from the point of view of Marguerite, de Carrouges’ wife.

She represents a rag doll in a childish play by two men, who consider her nothing more than an object in their dispute. Le Gris will rape her one day. Instead of any emotional support, de Carrouges will use it as a pretext for a duel for life and death. At the same time, this section shows us for the first time that things did not happen quite as indicated in Carrouges’ part, and that he is actually as bad as his opponent.

The question of female orgasm

The medical “facts” that people in the film believe are almost funny. One is that rape cannot lead to pregnancy. Another, quite surprising at the time, is that without a woman having an orgasm during sex, she cannot get pregnant. According to this logic, there would now be seven people walking around the world.

In any case, the film’s strongest appeal is the view of a 14th-century woman who has to face a deep-rooted misogyny, and whose suffering is much more difficult to look at than mortally wounded men running wildly around the battlefield.

Jodie Comer, who became famous primarily as a Russian assassin in the series On the Fly, is fantastic in the role of Marguerite de Carrouges and proves that she is able to play diametrically different and at the same time emotionally demanding tasks without any problems. Stunning and downright disgusting in the whole situation is Le Gris’s relentless belief that no rape took place because Marguerite was “just playing inaccessible.”

Photo: Cinemart

The Last Duel – Movie The hero, played by Matt Damon, is set by fate against his ex-boyfriend.

If the film was just about the dispute between two men, it would have no special benefit. Thanks to the final part, however, it is also possible to forgive the fact that he has two and a half hours. The tempo is chosen well, the director did not manage to repeat too many individual scenes, as they are portrayed through the testimonies of several people.

A small mistake of beauty is Driver’s bad Latin and the darkness of scenes that lack lighting, which has recently been typical of similarly themed films and series – an example is the historical film Favoritka or the infamous scene of the great struggle from the latest series Game of Thrones. Otherwise, it is a film that is definitely worth seeing.