THE HISTORY BEHIND THE LAST DUEL

So when, two weeks before the film’s North American release on October 15, I sat down with my wife, Peg, to watch a screening at a cinema on the Fox lot in Los Angeles, we were understandably excited and full of anticipation. Real people living almost legendary lives had been resurrected from history by the alchemy of Hollywood, and we felt as though we were about to travel back in time to meet them. We also were excited to relive our memorable journeys on the trail of the story, years earlier, through archives and historical sites in Normandy and Paris.

And we were not disappointed! We were wowed and moved and, the stellar performances by leading and supporting actors alike, the violent, immersive battle scenes and disturbing courtroom and bedroom dramas, and the gritty, palpable historical detail. Ridley Scott’s film is an epic masterpiece, a tour de force that portrays life in the Middle Ages as an almost foreign land of barbarity and brutality, yet also a portrait of an age – in a famous phrase, “a distant mirror” – that reflects back a troubling and unflattering image of ourselves, heirs as we are today to so many persistent pathologies involving men, women, and rape. “The truth does not matter,” says Marguerite’s bitter mother-in-law. “There is only the power of men.” Words that apply just as well to recent history in Hollywood itself.