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The discredit of fiction today is such that for a story to acquire the privilege not of truth, which also, but of simple interest, it has to be based on real events. And that is so even if the supposedly true events are, precisely, the conversion of reality into myth, into pure fabrication. '
The last duel',
which is nothing more than the penultimate film of the
unbeatable octogenarian Ridley Scott
(also has pending release
'The Gucci House
'), is both a good and a bad example of all the above. The film adapts Eric Lager's novel published in 2004 that builds on a famous 14th-century French cultural legend. The first label of the tape is dedicated to recording not the book but the real foundation of what follows.
Let's say that the decision of both the screenwriters
Ben Affleck, Matt Damon and Nicole Holofcener
and the director who was awarded the Glory to the Filmmaker trophy at the Mostra on Friday to place the poster there is not trivial. The film is - in addition to a spectacular production of knights, swords and tournaments to the last blood - a comment as supposedly timely as it is decidedly opportunistic, both, to what has come to be called the
culture of rape.
It is about proving with a story "based on reality" that the submission of women to the dictates of a world ordered by a predatory conception of virility comes from far. It comes, perhaps, from always.
"It is a story that was not only a determined accusation of a woman, but also revealed a cultural assumption that Europe shares with the countries colonized by her: for centuries women have not been seen as human beings," says Affleck before the press after declaring himself a feminist. And he continues: "
And, in fact, many residual aspects of that perspective remain
.
"
"The film talks about a system and a time that systematically rapes women because they are considered the property of men and as such they are treated," adds Damon in case there was any doubt.
The film, in effect, tells the story of a woman (played by Jodie Comer) raped a thousand times. First by her own husband (Matt Damon), then by the gentleman
(Adam Driver)
who claims to be in love with her unfading beauty, and finally by each and every one of those who doubt her testimony and thus make her responsible for her misfortune. What the film orders from beginning to end is the duel between the husband and the abuser, both offended despite their status as aggressors. Often happens. It would be the last of the duels, as the title states, celebrated as an ordeal or judgment of God.
The very high (maximum exponent of the mystical heteropatriarchy, it could be said) would leave the innocent alive.
Of course, if the husband is the one who dies, the wife is thrown at the stake.
Scott organizes the narration as long ago and in an inaugural way did Kurosawa in his mythical '
Rashomon
'. Three times the same story is told from each point of view: husband, stalker and victim. Of course, in the face of the panic of relativism in such a delicate and crucial matter, the film makes efforts to mark distances with the Japanese master. Now not all versions are true, not all argue with each other. "Only the victim has the right to the truth," the director of
Thlema & Louise
comments somewhat
pompously
to drive away criticism and bad thoughts. What's more, at the press conference he
angrily invited a journalist to watch the film again. For doubting and for asking.
So far, little to object.
The problem is not the idea, but the few ideas that, against all odds, the director contributes in the staging.
Scott limits himself to repeating the violation three times with only minimal changes that only underscore the already underlined message. It is clear that the written script treasures the irrefutable and impeccable intention of making it clear that what is natural for some (for the character of Driver it is logical to assault the object of his passion for being his and for Damon it is normal to humiliate his wife because what is settled is her honor) for the victim it is not so much. This way of ordering the universe with such and cruel '
naturalness
'would, in effect, be a punishment more human than divine. In fact, the error is not so much in the text as in the routine exercise of directing that is more concerned with spectacularity than with meaning; more attentive not to make mistakes or make mistakes than to portray with due rigor and despair the mistake of everything that concerns him, which is also everything that concerns us. Here and now.
It would seem that the film does not trust the weapons and clarity of a well-presented argument and prefers to shift the burden of proof to repeat the message, to insist, as each of the signs that separate each chapter seem to suggest, that neither the fabulation nor the cinema itself are enough.
When introducing chapter three, in an exercise in pedagogy close to simply clumsiness (or a simple lie), the title
"Marguerite's Truth"
fades away until only "The Truth" remains on the screen.
Of course, the duel that opens and closes the film is simply irresistible,
very close to, in its proverbial frivolity, the memorable.
SOCIAL CINEMA FROM THE ENTREPRENEUR
For the rest, and at the end, the official competition (Scott's film was presented out of competition) closed with
'Un autre monde',
by
Stéphane Brizé.
With this film, the French director completes the accidental trilogy that began filming in 2015 with 'The law of the market' and continued in 2018 with 'At war' around the imbalances in society that we have experienced. If the first followed the existential adventure of an unemployed man in his fifties forced to accept any job and the second recounted the fight between factory workers to keep their jobs, now the hero is, surprise, the businessman. Social cinema since, and for the first time, the boss.
True to himself, the director turns the camera into a hammer. Each one of the vicissitudes of an electrical appliance company obliged time and again to reduce costs is recounted with an eye that is always feverish and always clear.
Brizé makes each plane directly breathe through the infinite wounds of a tragedy by fractured force.
The approach of the film is impeccable and the introduction of the hand of a conversation in front of the lawyers who certify the failure of the well-off marriage that leads the odyssey seems masterful.
The problem, which there is, arises in the strange decision to subject Vincent Lindon's character (always him, since he is the protagonist of all three films) to a dramatic arc very close to the implausible.
Brizé's always laudable determination not to demonize his protagonist and thus distance him from the caricature of the unscrupulous potentate ends up placing him exactly on the opposite shore.
What wants to be a necessary and desperate fight to escape the cliché ends up creating another.
Pity.
Be that as it may, there is always the certainty of an impeccable and very "based on the real events" of the films of
Campion, Almodóvar, Schrader, Sorrentino or Diwan.
Tomorrow the record.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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