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Oct. 15th, 2021 09:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lakeeffectgirlI did indeed go by myself to opening night of The Last Duel. There is a point where Ben Affleck's character tells Adam Driver's character to take off his pants.
Also the dude who was Hickey on The Terror is there, as well as Marton Csokas, making this Marton's second movie with Matt Damon. Everyone was really enjoying saying "Jean de Carrouges" a lot.
This movie tells the same set of events three times from three different perspectives. Matt Damon and Adam Driver fight for France together. Matt Damon's wife and son died of the plague, so when he meets Jodie Comer he's like "...possible second wife?" and negotiates for some extra land as part of her dowry. He thinks when his dad dies that he'll inherit a captaincy and run a fort.
Jodie Comer's dad owes Ben Affleck's flashy Count Pierre in taxes (so does Matt), and Count Pierre puts Adam Driver in charge of collecting taxes, and the land that was supposed to be for Jodie's dowry gets handed to Pierre for taxes. Pierre gifts it to Adam Driver, because they have become BFFs and they orgy together. Matt Damon thus no longer wants to be Adam Driver's friend! He sues for the land but since Ben Affleck is the king's cousin this fails. So now Matt Damon is out of favor. A year passes and Matt and Adam try to patch things up at a party but Adam decides he's in love with Jodie Comer the second he sees her. Matt's dad dies, and Pierre gives the captaincy to Adam instead.
Matt leaves to fight some more and gets knighted while he's there, then reports back to Pierre that the campaign sucked and has another falling out with Adam. Matt goes to Paris to get paid, and his mom (who doesn't like Jodie) takes all the servants on some errand and leaves Jodie home alone even though Matt said never to leave her alone, and Hickey from the Terror shows up and pretends his horse is getting a new shoe put on (Jodie knows him) and once she opens the door to him Adam Driver barges in, kicks Hickey out again, confesses his love to Jodie, and then rapes her. Since it's the 1300s, she is not taken very seriously, but Matt does believe her - more because he's mad that Adam's done yet another thing to him, since rape was a property crime in the 1300s. (The rape is clearly a non-consensual act, even in Adam's section where he appears to be thinking that since he loves her that means Marguerite's protestations really just mean yes.)
There's the various avenues the Carrougeses attempt to go through and everyone testifies (there's a lot of leaning on the "you can't get pregnant unless you have an orgasm so having an orgasm is very important" mindset of the time, which basically functions as foreshadowing since it's not until Marguerite's POV section that you see she's pregnant while testifying - then one of the judges trots out the ol' "the body has a way of shutting that down" line, so the belief is that if the baby is Adam Driver's then the sex was consensual) and eventually Matt throws down his glove and requests the duel.
(There is an interview with Ben where he's like "things were worse (for women) in France in the 1300s than we wrote it but we had to dial it back so people weren't horribly mad about history".)
Quite a bit of the stuff in Matt's and Jodie's section overlaps since they're together more often as married couple, but there are definite differences in how characters view events. Adam's section is quite different and his is where most of Ben Affleck's bonkers-but-it-works performance happens.
You don't get the info until Marguerite's section that if Matt loses the duel, that means her accusation is false in the eyes of God and she'll be burned at the stake for making a false accusation. The duel then stands alone in a separate section - I honestly couldn't watch a lot of it because I'm a wimp about violence these days - but eventually Matt wins. If I had a nickel for every tortured death I've seen Adam Driver suffer on screen I'd have two? three? nickels, which isn't a lot of nickels but I've only seen a handful of his movies!
This movie is set in France but no one even bothers to sound like it.
Please note: There is a scene where Ben Affleck walks into a room and the room is dim and all you see of his approach are the sparkly sections of his clothes.
Also the dude who was Hickey on The Terror is there, as well as Marton Csokas, making this Marton's second movie with Matt Damon. Everyone was really enjoying saying "Jean de Carrouges" a lot.
This movie tells the same set of events three times from three different perspectives. Matt Damon and Adam Driver fight for France together. Matt Damon's wife and son died of the plague, so when he meets Jodie Comer he's like "...possible second wife?" and negotiates for some extra land as part of her dowry. He thinks when his dad dies that he'll inherit a captaincy and run a fort.
Jodie Comer's dad owes Ben Affleck's flashy Count Pierre in taxes (so does Matt), and Count Pierre puts Adam Driver in charge of collecting taxes, and the land that was supposed to be for Jodie's dowry gets handed to Pierre for taxes. Pierre gifts it to Adam Driver, because they have become BFFs and they orgy together. Matt Damon thus no longer wants to be Adam Driver's friend! He sues for the land but since Ben Affleck is the king's cousin this fails. So now Matt Damon is out of favor. A year passes and Matt and Adam try to patch things up at a party but Adam decides he's in love with Jodie Comer the second he sees her. Matt's dad dies, and Pierre gives the captaincy to Adam instead.
Matt leaves to fight some more and gets knighted while he's there, then reports back to Pierre that the campaign sucked and has another falling out with Adam. Matt goes to Paris to get paid, and his mom (who doesn't like Jodie) takes all the servants on some errand and leaves Jodie home alone even though Matt said never to leave her alone, and Hickey from the Terror shows up and pretends his horse is getting a new shoe put on (Jodie knows him) and once she opens the door to him Adam Driver barges in, kicks Hickey out again, confesses his love to Jodie, and then rapes her. Since it's the 1300s, she is not taken very seriously, but Matt does believe her - more because he's mad that Adam's done yet another thing to him, since rape was a property crime in the 1300s. (The rape is clearly a non-consensual act, even in Adam's section where he appears to be thinking that since he loves her that means Marguerite's protestations really just mean yes.)
There's the various avenues the Carrougeses attempt to go through and everyone testifies (there's a lot of leaning on the "you can't get pregnant unless you have an orgasm so having an orgasm is very important" mindset of the time, which basically functions as foreshadowing since it's not until Marguerite's POV section that you see she's pregnant while testifying - then one of the judges trots out the ol' "the body has a way of shutting that down" line, so the belief is that if the baby is Adam Driver's then the sex was consensual) and eventually Matt throws down his glove and requests the duel.
(There is an interview with Ben where he's like "things were worse (for women) in France in the 1300s than we wrote it but we had to dial it back so people weren't horribly mad about history".)
Quite a bit of the stuff in Matt's and Jodie's section overlaps since they're together more often as married couple, but there are definite differences in how characters view events. Adam's section is quite different and his is where most of Ben Affleck's bonkers-but-it-works performance happens.
You don't get the info until Marguerite's section that if Matt loses the duel, that means her accusation is false in the eyes of God and she'll be burned at the stake for making a false accusation. The duel then stands alone in a separate section - I honestly couldn't watch a lot of it because I'm a wimp about violence these days - but eventually Matt wins. If I had a nickel for every tortured death I've seen Adam Driver suffer on screen I'd have two? three? nickels, which isn't a lot of nickels but I've only seen a handful of his movies!
This movie is set in France but no one even bothers to sound like it.
Please note: There is a scene where Ben Affleck walks into a room and the room is dim and all you see of his approach are the sparkly sections of his clothes.
