Hunting goodwill? Damon and Affleck together again for The Last Duel

In 1998 young aspiring actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon unexpectedly won an Oscar for a script they had written together about a disturbed young maths genius, played in the film by Damon. It was a modest film, made bigger by the dominance of a major actor, Robin Williams as a professor.

Twenty years later, they have written another film, The Last Duel, a huge period movie directed by Sir Ridley Scott, whose mastery of enormous sets, surging crowds of extras and soaring crane shots put him firmly on the side of the historical epic. How things change in 20 years.

“I think we found it an entirely different process this time,” Damon told a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere on Friday.

Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Ridley Scott on the red carpet in Venice.Credit: AP

“One of the things that had kept us from writing for so many years was that the way we wrote back in the ’90s, when we were 22 and 20 years old, was really inefficient. We ended up writing thousands of pages we never used and all kinds of scenes that just wouldn’t make any sense in the movie that eventually came out.”

They thought they would never have time to collaborate again but this script took them just six weeks.

The Last Duel tells the true story of Marguerite de Carrouges, a 14th-century noblewoman who was raped by an influential adviser to the local lord, Jacques le Gris, played by Adam Driver. It is drawn from a 2004 novel of the same name by Eric Jager, which was in turn based on exhaustive research into the real case.

Marguerite broke the customary silence by saying what had been done to her. Her husband, grizzled soldier Sir Jean de Carrouges (played by Damon with some fencing scars and a distracting mullet), takes the case to the king. His wife had no legal standing. If there was an offence, it was against him.

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez step out on the red carpet.Credit: AP

Affleck said he was compelled by the character of Marguerite, who ran the risk of being executed in seeking justice. “It was important and interesting to tell a story that wasn’t just an indictment of one bad person but that pointed to the cultural antecedent that Europe and countries colonised by European countries share,” he said. “One that didn’t view women for many, many centuries as human beings and, in fact, many residual aspects of that perspective remain.”

As in modern #MeToo cases, it is not so much events as each person’s interpretation of events that are disputed. The story is told in three chapters from three perspectives: Sir Jean’s narrative, casting himself as the chivalrous hero; the same events as seen by le Gris, who believes his good name is being besmirched unfairly and finally that of Marguerite, whose feelings have never been much noticed by anybody. Scott said it was the structure of the script, which required filming many scenes in slightly different ways, that interested him.

Matt Damon as Jean de Carrouges in The Last Duel.Credit: 20th Century Studios

Writer and director Nicole Holofcener joined the team to write Marguerite’s perspective, while Damon and Affleck concentrated on the men. “Of course, we were all aware of the #MeToo movement but I don’t really write that way,” said Holofcener. “The last thing I know we all wanted was to be on a soap box, and say, ‘Look how relevant it is today,’ because I think people will get that. I just worked on her as a human being … and we did take a great deal of care in making sure that her story is the true story.”

The film’s ambitions met a mixed response in the first trade press reviews. Trade magazine Variety praised its storytelling, but observed it slipping into “costume drama camp … like watching A Man for All Seasons meets Game of Thrones with a soupcon of Monty Python”. The three-chapter structure made the film dawdle, according to Hollywood Reporter; only in the final chapter did it “fire on all cylinders”.

Screen had similar misgivings. “Marguerite’s story could have made a fascinating, somewhat Shavian drama if only the grandiose spectacle (and the 152-minute running time) had been stripped back.” For Ben Croll in Indiewire, however, the film was a rare beast, “an intelligent and genuinely daring big-budget melee”.

Whether fans of The Gladiator will fall in behind that sentiment remains to be seen.

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