medieval

THE LAST DUEL: power, gender, superstition and knights in armor

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Photo caption: Adam Driver and Matt Damon in THE LAST DUEL. Courtesy 20th Century Studios.

Based on accounts of the last medieval trial by combat, The Last Duel is both a thriller and a thinker. Director Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, The Martian) brings alive medieval superstition and savagery, and embeds an exploration of the power dynamics within feudal society, especially for women.

The setting is France in the 1380s. Jean (Matt Damon) and Jacques (Adam Driver) have been born into the nobility as squires, which means that they serve as mounted, armored warriors and can own land and castles supported by their very own peasants. Jean is later promoted to the higher title of knight. That puts Jean and Jacques in the elite one percent, but they are totally subservient to the region’s count, Pierre (Ben Affleck), who in turn owes the same absolute fealty to King Charles VI (check him out on Wikipedia).

Jean is an impressive fighter, but not very strategic. He’s a dunderhead, devoid of any social or political skill. Jean has married the beautiful and intelligent aristocrat Marguerite (Jodie Comer), whose father had fallen out of royal favor. Try as she might, Marguerite is only moderately successful in helping Jean from bulling his way through life’s china shop.

Jacques is a canny smoothy, with a rare business sense and charm that melts the ladies. Those financial smarts, along with his appreciation for culture, makes Jacques a protege of Pierre, the count. Pierre favors favors Jacques over Jean, who resents it.

Finding Marguerite alone at home, Jacques rapes her. When Marguerite accuses him, Jacques denies it. Jean presses the case, which culminates in the film’s titular trial by combat.

Ridley Scott tells the story first from Jean’s point of view, then from Jacques’ and, finally, from Margeurite’s. Unlike in Rashomon, the three versions of what occurred don’t diverge much from each other. Instead, we see how Jean and Jacques, who both adhere to the code of their class, see themselves. Jean really thinks that he is a good husband. Jacques, although he has forced himself on Marguerite without her consent, really doesn’t think he has committed rape. (They have their Code of Chivalry, but it sure isn’t very chivalrous.)

Jodie Comer in THE LAST DUEL. Courtesy 20th Century Studios.

We learn that, in 1300s European legality, rape wasn’t even a violent crime against the woman, but was a property crime against her guardian; (she was essentially the property of her father or husband). Ridley Scott slyly emphasizes this when he shows Jean’s reaction to an equine assault on his favorite breeding mare.

Margeurite’s insistence on bringing the rape charge publicly is a major problem for both Jean and for Jacques. It’s also an annoying inconvenience for the count, the king and the Church, who would sweep it under the rug. Jean thinks that he cleverly found away around the cover-up, but he overlooks one disturbing factor – if he dies in the duel, Marguerite will be immediately burned at the stake.

The performances by Comer, Driver, Damon and Affleck are all excellent. Harriet Walker is very good as Jean’s mother, a role which seems at first like a stereotypical stereotypical shrewish mother-in-law, until we learn of her own complicated journey navigating a world where men are unaccountable.

Scott shows us some savage medieval battles to prepare us for the final duel. Warfare at the time was desperate and brutal hand-to-hand butchery, within a sword’s length, like fighting in a phone booth. To stab, slash or impale an opponent, a combatant needed to find an unarmored body part. The jousting in The Last Duel seems especially authentic.

The Wife didn’t want to accompany me when I described it as the “medieval rape movie”; I should have said it’s the “trial by combat movie”.

I was late to The Last Duel, catching up with it several months after its summer 2021 release. Due to the distributor’s blustery publicity campaign, I had underestimated it; it’s one of the Best Movies of 2021, The Last Duel is streaming from Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube, HBO and redbox.

BENEDETTA: a mystery of belief, made scandalous

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Photo caption: Daphné Patakia (second from left), Virginie Efira (center) and Charlotte Rampling (right) in BENEDETTA. Courtesy of IFC Films.

Benedetta is Paul Verhoeven’s extraordinary film about belief, embedded in scandalous Renaissance history.

Let’s get right to the scandalous part, which has earned Benedetta notoriety since its premiere at Cannes. As a filmmaker, Paul Verhoeven has proven himself to be an enthusiastic provocateur with the lurid Basic Instinct and Showgirls and the more mature (and still subversive) Elle.

So, everybody expects something outrageous from Verhoeven, but, in Benedetta, he plunged right past naughty to sacrilege – two nuns pleasuring each other with a figurine of the Virgin Mary adapted into a dildo. I had originally titled this review “two nuns, a dildo and the Black Death“.

But Benedetta is really a highly entertaining parable, albeit a cynical one, about belief and class. Here’s the story.

It’s the early 1600s in Tuscany, and Benedetta, the precocious and spirited eight-year-old daughter of a rich family (more on that later) enters a convent. Even as a child she attracts strange happenings, which could be miracles or coincidences. She grows into a talented young woman (Virginie Efira of Sibyl). With a gift for performance and her education, she becomes indispensable to the abbess (Charlotte Rampling), whether as the star of religious pageants or in keeping the convent’s books.

When the earthy and saucy Bartolomea (Daphné Patakia) joins the convent, the two become secret lovers.

Benedetta starts having more intense visions – visions of a very tangible Jesus. She starts speaking in a male register, as if possessed by Him. Then she develops stigmata. Holy moly!

Are these real miracles on earth produced by God – supernatural events that result from sincere faith? Or are they a hoax, dishonestly manufactured by Benedetta for her own benefit? Or is she experiencing delusions, hallucinations and disassociation due to what we understand today as a mental disorder?

The canny abbess (Rampling) and the provost (Olivier Rabourdin) the town’s chief religious leader, both from the educated upper class, disdain any possibility of miracles here, but cynically choose to accept the financial benefits of their very own destination for pilgrims. The parish priest, mindful of his superiors’ authority and the new money, turns a blind eye. It’s established early in Benedetta that the convent is run on money, not only on devotion, and that the hierarchy of the Church is entirely corrupt. Unfortunately for the locals, the papal nuncio to Florence (Lambert Wilson) gets wind of the possible chicanery, and he won’t be made a fool of.

Of course, people tend to believe what conforms to their own narratives. In Benedetta, belief in the supernatural is presented not as faith, but as superstition – and it runs along class lines. Benedetta, the abbess, the provost and the nuncio are privileged to have been born to wealth, which brings education and power. The townspeople and the nuns from humble backgrounds are ignorant and gullible – why wouldn’t God appear in my time and my town?

Bartolomea is most assuredly from among the ignorant and powerless, but, between orgasms, she sees what is happening with her own eyes.

Benedetta is based on Judith C. Brown’s book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Benedetta Carlini, Sister Bartolomea, Father Ricordati and the papal nuncio Alfonso Giglioli are real historical characters. Benedetta and Bartolomea’s sexual liaison, Benedetta’s claims of stigmata and supernatural visions and the Plague in northern Italy all really happened. Verhoeven took some liberties with the ending (and the dildo).

Verhoeven sure lets us know that we are in 17th Century Italy. A hundred years before, Michelangelo and Brunelleschi may have been changing the world’s culture 45 miles away in Florence, but this is still an age where the Church can have someone burned at the stake. This is a world of the bubonic plague, roving bands of mercenary brigands, self-flagellation by the devout and horrific (off-screen) torture.

One of the pleasures of Benedetta is the medieval and Renaissance music on the soundtrack.

There isn’t a bad performance in Benedetta. I gotta say that Charlotte Rampling remains one of my favorite screen actors, with her eyes ranging from the most piercing to the saddest and most knowing. Benedetta is far from her most transgressive film, having starred in The Night Porter (1974). Rampling has delivered some of her most powerful work in the past decade: 45 Years and The Sense of an Ending.

Ever the carnival barker, Paul Verhoeven draws an audience into the tent with over-the-top sex and sacrilege for a thoughtful exploration of faith and superstition. Benedetta is now in a few art house theaters.

THE GREEN KNIGHT: more of a test than a quest

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Photo caption: Dev Patel in THE GREEN KNIGHT. Photo courtesy of A24.

In the swords-and-sorcerers fantasy The Green Knight, Dev Patel plays Sir Gawain of Arthurian legend. Gawain is privileged to be the son of a sorceress (Sarita Choudhury) and the nephew of the king (Sean Harris), and both have high hopes for him. But Gawain is short in the maturity department; he is so much of a wastrel that he can’t find his own boots after a debauch.

The callow Gawain asks, Is it wrong to want greatness? His girlfriend (Alicia Vickander) replies, Isn’t it enough to be good? This movie is about goodness (responsibility, duty, loyalty, faithfulness) as a prerequisite to greatness. Gawain would prefer to skip a necessary step.

The otherworldly Green Knight crashes Christmas dinner at the king’s court and offers a chilling “game”. He challenges anyone to strike him a blow, on the condition that the Green Knight return the blow in one year’s time. Gawain doesn’t have the emotional intelligence to pick up that the actually heroic knights around him are all spooked by an offer that seems to good to be true. Impulsively, Gawain beheads the Green Knight. The Green Knight then picks up his head and exits, turning to utter the words, One year – hence. Oops.

One year later, it’s time for Gawain to keep his end of the bargain and travel to the Green Knight’s chapel in the woods. Not having used the year to develop any more maturity or responsibility, Gawain embarks on his quest, clearly not ready for prime time as a heroic knight. He is gifted with talismans that he keeps losing and which are nonetheless restored to him. He is embarrassingly outmatched by an untethered punk of a brigand (Barry Keogh).

After a series of adventures, Gawain arrives in the Green Knight’s forest lair, and it’s time for us to see what he’s made of. The Green Knight is less a movie about a quest than it is about a character test. The thing about a test is that it can be passed or it can be failed.

Writer-director David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, A Ghost Story) seems like a pretty high brow director for a Knights of the Round Table tale. It is Lowery’s focus on character that makes The Green Knight a movie fit for thinking adults (and decidedly not a popcorn movie for kids).

It may not be apparent from The Movie Gourmet’s unrelenting menu of indie, international and documentary films, but I like a good adventure movie. What The Green Knight demonstrates, as a counter example, is that the folks who make tent pole movies today aren’t even trying.

The special effects are great. In particular, the face of the Green Knight himself is literally wooden, yet his eyes range from mischievous to profoundly sad, and somehow he manages an expressive smirk. There’s a CGI fox as realistic as any I’ve seen and a spectacular platoon of ghostly giants.

Lowery creates a dark, damp, sinister medieval England. The Dark Knight was filmed around Cahir Castle in Ireland, a delightful place that I’ve visited in the summertime, but which is gloomy and forbidding in this movie.

The Green Knight is slow but not ponderous, the exception being when Vikander, as a second character, has to recite a pretentious and tiresome monologue.

Dev Patel ‘s performance is excellent. Patel is remarkably charismatic. His performances here and in The Personal History of David Copperfield indicate that he is currently underutilized – this guy can carry the biggest film. It’s hard to believe that he was only 18 when he broke through with Slumdog Millionaire. At 31, he should be on the verge of an epic body of work.

Joel Edgerton shows up late in The Green Knight, and steals scenes as a charming nobleman. Edgerton turns on a melodious voice and the delivery of a trained Shakespearean.

Edgerton continues to surprise me. He is a guy who could have settled into a career of hunky action roles; he played the Navy Seal leader in Zero Dark Thirty and the thuggish Baz Brown in Animal Kingdom. But he’s also played the husband in the civil rights drama Loving. And he’s written and directed the brilliant neo-noir thriller The Gift and the topical Boy Erased.

Does Gawain have the makings of a chivalric hero? Outwardly, he’s got the chain mail and the battle axe. The Green Knight takes the measure of what’s on the inside.

THE OUTLAW KING: medieval slaughter, falling flat

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Chris Pine in THE OUTLAW KING

Chris Pine has the title role in Netflix’s The Outlaw King.  It’s the story of Robert the Bruce, who wrested control of Scotland from the English and became the Scottish king in the early 1300s. I like Chris Pine, and he makes a medieval warlord very relatable, but this movie is pretty flat. I was especially disappointed because I admired director David Mackenzie’s last movie (Hell or High Water – also with Chris Pine) so much.

I’m guessing from Mackenzie’s surname that he was drawn to Bruce as an icon of Scottish nationalism. But all these historical struggles of conquest and rebellion in the feudal era were really just tugs of war between rival warlords – the moral equivalent of the Soprano Family. To its credit, The Outlaw King (as do Shakespeare’s histories) does not overly romanticize the self-serving motivations of the nobility

The Outlaw King is kinda historically accurate – it captures the overall arc of the story, although Bruce’s archenemy, the future Edward II, was not at the battle of Loudin Hill and, hence did not engage in a mano a mano showdown with Bruce there as depicted.

On the other hand, there isn’t much in the historical record about most women in the early 1300s, particularly Bruce’s second wife, Elizabeth (Florence Pugh).  The filmmakers have constructed a pretty interesting character in Elizabeth, so that’s all to the good.

We do know that Edward II was a pretty interesting cat (not a complement), but, while The Outlaw King portrays Edward’s problems with Dad and hints at his narcissistic bravado, it misses the chance to go deeper.

There is a lot of the hacking and hewing of medieval combat a la Braveheart, in The Outlaw King, chiefly in Bruce’s pivotal victory at the battle of Loudon Hill. But the overall emptiness of the movie leaves the battle scenes, as well-crafted as they are, less thrilling than those in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight and Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V.

The Outlaw King exists for those who need a dose of medieval slaughter and a spunky queen, but there’s not enough there for the rest of us.