The Last Duel · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch where Marguerite stands in the frame. For most of two hours she is pushed to the side of any shot that holds her — a figure at the edge of her husband's story, a face half-out of frame in her rapist's. Then her own chapter starts and the camera, after so much marginality, simply puts her in the middle. Nothing else declares itself. Wolski keeps the same muddy ochres, the same overcast Norman light he has used all along. Only the placement has changed, and the placement turns out to be the entire argument.

The film tells one story three times. Carrouges's version, Le Gris's version, Marguerite's — each opening with a title card that calls itself a truth. Repetition is the method: the camera returns to scenes we have already watched and films them again from a different stance, so that the same staircase, the same dinner, the same assault arrive twice or three times, each time slightly re-weighted. Deleuze had a name for what happens when cinema does this. He called it the powers of the false. Classical film operated on a contract — the image, however staged, was taken to deliver something true, and editing existed to confirm it. Once filmmakers start offering accounts that cannot all be true and refuse to rank them, that contract breaks. Narration becomes falsifying narration: mutually exclusive versions presented as co-true, with no outside vantage to settle them. This is the engine Kurosawa built in Rashomon (1950), and Scott inherits its grammar almost verbatim — return to the identical scene, reposition the camera, let the repetition itself say that no single version is sovereign.

But watch what each pass actually does to the moment. In Le Gris's chapter the courtship reads as mutual; in Marguerite's the same gestures read as menace. The image does not just get reinterpreted — it gets recomposed and then quietly replaced by its own re-description, so that the 'real' scene recedes behind competing pictures of it. Deleuze calls this crystalline description: the image stops pointing at a stable object and instead keeps dissolving and reconstituting it. And Le Gris is the figure who makes it run. Adam Driver plays him as a man of genuine, self-deluding charm, unable to read refusal as refusal — which is to say he is the forger, Deleuze's central character of the false: not a liar who knows he lies, but someone who manufactures his own truth and lives inside it. The horror of the performance is its sincerity.

The three versions are also three presents that will not collapse into one timeline. Each chapter says 'this is what happened,' in the present tense of its teller, and the film lets these incompatible presents coexist. That coexistence — contradictory presents held side by side rather than resolved into before-and-after — is what Deleuze calls peaks of present. It is why the differences between chapters are so small and so devastating: a held reaction shot here, an evasive cut there. The image loses its self-evidence. You have to read it, decipher the gap between this telling and the last — the screen become a lectosign, something to be parsed rather than simply seen. Holofcener writing Marguerite's chapter while Damon and Affleck wrote the men's is the craft version of this: each author owning a character's vision, the camera speaking for each in turn, a free-indirect fusion of narrator and frame.

Here is where the film does something almost no powers-of-the-false film does. The tradition — Welles, Resnais, Rashomon — treats undecidability as a liberation, a release from the old tyranny of the single truth. The Last Duel runs that whole machine and then refuses its conclusion. The third card does not say 'according to Marguerite.' It asserts her chapter as the truth, and shoots the assault with a fixed, unflinching proximity that the men's evasive cutting had spared us. The argument lands: undecidability is not neutral. It is a privilege — the luxury of the men who get to have versions. For the woman whose body and life are the stake, 'we can never know' is not freedom, it is erasure. Scott weaponizes the time-image's signature device in order to indict it.

The lineage sharpens this. Hero (2002) gave each Rashomon-chapter its own color to flag whose feeling governs; Scott pointedly withholds that, keeping one desaturated palette so the men cannot hide inside a flattering chroma. Against Braveheart's golden-hour swell and emotional score, his diegetic clank of armor and subdued drones strip out the manipulation that secures male-hero identification. He repurposes the arena of his own Gladiator (2000) — the institutional trial by combat, the crowd, Arthur Max's oxidized world — and systematically denies the catharsis that genre is built to deliver. And he medievalizes the rape-trial procedural of The Accused (1988): the deposition before ecclesiastical men, staged with deliberate procedural flatness, where the legal apparatus is the real site of violence. Around it, the Count d'Alençon's louche, commodified court — Affleck playing decadence in an anachronistic contemporary key — gives us crystal-decomposition, an ordered aristocratic world visibly rotting from inside.

What the film did to narrative is small and exact. It took the most fashionable structure in modern cinema — the multi-perspective truth-machine — and proved it could be turned against its own relativism. Watch Marguerite move from the margin to the center of the frame, and you have watched a film argue, with nothing but where a body stands, that some testimony is not one version among others. Then watch the men insist on the duel anyway.