Judgment will be left in the hands of fate.
On Tuesday, the first trailer for Ridley Scott’s medieval epic “The Last Duel” debuted, starring Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Jodie Comer, and Ben Affleck.
Damon and Affleck reunited for the first time since 1997’s “Good Will Hunting” to co-write the screenplay for the film with Nicole Holofcener, based on the book The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France, by Eric Jager.
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The film, set in 14th-century France, tells the true story of friends-turned-rivals Jean de Carrouges (Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Driver), who engage in trial by combat after Le Gris sexually assaults de Carrouges’s wife Marguerite (Comer).
Despite Le Gris’ denials, Marguerite “refuses to stay silent, stepping forward to accuse her attacker, an act of bravery and defiance that puts her life in jeopardy. The ensuing trial by combat, a gruelling duel to the death, places the fate of all three in God’s hands.”
Talking about his experience making the film, Scott said, “I love working with Matt, so it was an added bonus to be able to work with him and Ben as both actors and as screenwriters, along with Nicole Holofcener, and I knew it would be a great result. I had admired the show ‘Killing Eve’ and had been looking for the opportunity to present Jodie Comer with a challenging role. Her performance as Marguerite will make her one of the great actresses of her generation.”
Holofcener, Affleck, and Damon added, “This film is an effort to retell the story of a heroic woman from history whom most people haven’t heard of. We admired her bravery and resolute determination and felt this was both a story that needed to be told and one whose drama would captivate audiences the way it moved us as writers. As we further explored the story, we found so many aspects of the formal, codified patriarchy of 14th-century Western Europe to still be present in vestigial ways (and in some cases almost unchanged) in today’s society.”
They continued, “We chose to use the device of telling the story from several character’s perspectives in order to examine the immutable fact that although often multiple people who experience the same event come away with differing accounts, there can only be one truth.”
“The Last Duel” hits theatres October 15.
