After Alien: The Covenant, master director Ridley Scott's new book, The Last Duel, is finally available.
The master shot, and sure enough, it was different. After the film was launched, mainland audiences directly gave a high score of 8.4. IMDb gave it a score of 75, MTC also had a good 67 points, and the film received unanimous praise at home and abroad. Although the final box office results were average, the quality of the film is unquestionable.
"The Last Duel" brings together matt Damon, Adam Dreifer, and Ben Affleck, and the salaries of the three of them alone are amazingly high, and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are also directly involved in the writing of the script, which is a dedicated effort.
In addition to the three male gods, there is also the popular goddess Judy Comer, the actress who is red to purple due to the American drama "Kill Eve", which adds a different color to the film, and its role and importance even overshadow the three male gods.
Because "The Last Duel" is a completely female film, a "big heroine" film with the significance of the times. Different from the domestic "pseudo" female protagonist film and television drama, the female characters in "The Final Duel" are particularly tough, even in the Middle Ages, where divinity overshadows humanity, female characters still expose the hypocrisy and absurdity of men and divinity through their own willpower.
The film opens with a duel that leads to a feud between two medieval warriors, played by Matt Damon and Adam Dreifer.
The two were born and died together as comrades-in-arms, but their relationship deteriorated due to conflicts of interest in a manor and disputes over male authority, until they suspected that their wives had been violated and turned against each other.
The story is not complicated, but Ridley Scott tells one thing three times, with the knight Shandkarruzh and his friend Legge, and Shandkarugari's wife Margaret, three different perspectives, recounting the same event over and over again.
This narrative style is carried forward in the classic films Rashomon and Citizen Kane, and everyone has a truth and different emphases.
This time, however, Ridley Scott did not use this narrative method to create suspense, and his focus was not on the truth, but on the different views of the three people on events, to present the irrationality of male authority and medieval culture, and to correspond to the control mechanism of patriarchal culture over female subjects in real society.
At the heart of the film is the struggle for power.
Although the warlike Karuzh was able to fight a good war, his emotional intelligence was too low, he offended the baron, and lost his father's right to inherit. He was even "preempted" by his friend Legg, who was born from an ordinary person.
Although he married Margaret, the daughter of a nobleman, he not only lost his honor but also lost a large amount of land because of the baron's obstruction, so that he needed to constantly go on expeditions to earn gold coins to maintain his life and run the castle.
In Caruzh's own account, he is a battlefield warrior, a warm man in the love scene, and a hero with bad luck. But when he learned that his wife had been violated by his friend Legg, he firmly sided with his wife and appealed to the King of France, at the cost of his life, engaging in a "final duel" with the other party and returning his wife's innocence.
But in the second narrative, we see some differences. Legg's change of attitude towards Carruj, he was able to be appreciated by the baron because of his outstanding ability, not only good at fighting, but also good at mathematics, helping the baron manage his finances, latin, high emotional intelligence, and everyone's favor.
His femininity is quite good, and even Margaret has personally praised his masculine charm. In Leger's view, he did not violate Margaret, but a passion for mutual affection. He believed that Margaret loved him too, and that Caruzh was no more than a coarse man who could not read big characters, and was not worthy of Margaret's erudition and gentleness.
The different narratives of the two men leave room for the female Margaret and create a sense of suspense.
In the final chapter, Margaret tells her story of what she sees as the events, leaving the audience to a sudden realization. The truth doesn't really matter, the two men are just using their own interests to narrate a "lie" that completely ignores Margaret's feelings.
Margaret saw her husband's ignorance, the mess of the accounts in the house, and his inability to control his emotions, leading to being suppressed by the Baron. He chose to duel entirely to defend his honor, even at the cost of his wife's life. Because if Caruzh was defeated in a duel, Margaret would be burned at the stake.
According to Margaret's self-description, Legg is not a humble gentleman, and there is no emotional entanglement between the two, and the man's desire for her eventually turns into a humiliation.
The most ridiculous thing is that Margaret needs to prove her innocence through male duels, and she must bet her name and cause the whole country to watch and laugh before she can seek a truth and liberation under God's watch.
Although in the end, Caruchy narrowly won the duel, Legere's blood stained the fighting field, and was paraded in public, Margaret inherited the castle and land alone after her husband died with the Crusades, and it seemed that women became the final winners, but in fact Margaret really paid too much.
The focus of the three-paragraph narrative is not the truth, but the step-by-step presentation of the repressed environment of women, from the citizens of the spectator mentality to the royal power and the church that manipulate everything, they do not care whether Margaret is violated, but want to defend their own interests or satisfy their own selfish interests.
In the final analysis, in the comparison of the narrative chapters of the three people, we can see that the female characters are often better at observing the original face of the world, while the male characters are more likely to be self-conscious projections.
In the Middle Ages, women were always the last victims, vassals of men. Throughout their lives, they are treated as goods by male power, as bargaining chips by their fathers, as containers for inheritance by their husbands, and by other men as objects of sexual abuse and the use of their husbands' dignity.
Ridley Scott is not the first time to make such a feminist film, in the first part of "Alien", the heroine Ripley became the last action hero and heroine, this attempt to subtly infiltrate gender consciousness into the mainstream narrative, at least twenty years ahead of other mainstream Hollywood blockbusters.
It is worth mentioning that the film actually began shooting as early as 2020, because of the well-known reasons continue to delay. If the film were to be released during the outbreak of the producer Weinstein incident, I don't know how much public opinion resonance it would set off. After the film was delayed, it lost some of the enthusiasm that should have been close to the times, which is also a major regret that it lost at the box office.