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THE LAST DUEL

A true story of crime, scandal, and trial by combat in medieval france.

by Eric Jager ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 2004

Sex, savagery, and high-level political maneuvers energize a splendid piece of popular history. (Illustrations throughout)

An accusation of rape in 1386 occasions this high-suspense account of a duel to the death sanctioned by the French Parlement and King Charles VI—and attended by thousands of eager spectators.

Jager (English/UCLA) spins a complicated and sanguinary tale with the skill of an accomplished thriller author. The story involves two squires, once fast friends, who were gradually estranged as one, Jacques LeGris, rose in favor with the king and their local count while the other, Jean de Carrouges, fell. Jager ably illuminates Carrouges’s jealous, irascible temperament and LeGris’s superior political skills. Carrouges lost his wife and son to illness, married the much younger, very beautiful, and wealthy Marguerite de Thibouville, and eventually earned his knighthood in service of the king. But after Carrouges returned from a long absence, Marguerite told him that one day, when she was virtually unattended LeGris, arrived with a friend to offer his sexual services; when she refused, she claimed, he brutally raped her. Carrouges immediately looked for legal redress and initiated the process that eventually led to trial by combat before a silent crowd. (Silence was customary, and both participants and onlookers believed that God would allow the truthful combatant to prevail.) Jager knows his territory well; we learn a good deal about medieval armor and weaponry, fashion and custom, the legal system and sexual ideas, court politics and religion. His skillful prose quickly ensnares readers in the web of the characters’ invention, allowing no escape until very near the end. By the time the combat begins, halfway through the text, the tension is nearly unendurable. Who will win? Carrouges stood to lose more than his life: defeat would automatically consign his wife to the flames as a perjurer.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004

ISBN: 0-7679-1416-3

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Broadway

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004

HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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by David Grann

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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The Last Duel

37 pages • 1 hour read

The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

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Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 2

Part 1, Chapters 3-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-6

Part 2, Chapters 7-8

Part 2, Chapter 9-Appendix

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Summary and Study Guide

The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat (also published with the sub-title A True Story of Trial by Combat ) is a work of historical non-fiction, which was first published in 2004. It was written by Eric Jager , a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in medieval literature. In 2008, it was adapted as a documentary by the BBC. Also, a film adaptation, likewise titled The Last Duel , was released in 2021.

The book is an example of microhistory. Unlike histories that examine important events or broad trends (like the fall of the Roman Empire or the Meiji Restoration), microhistories focus on individuals who are not well-known political or cultural figures and/or events that would not usually be considered historically significant. However, microhistories also use the lives and experiences of these figures to make wider conclusions about the times and places in which they lived. This guide references the 2004 Broadway Books edition of the text.

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The Last Duel begins with a description of a duel being fought in 1386 on a field in Paris before an audience that includes King Charles VI of France. Also watching the duel is a woman in black, whose life literally depends on the outcome of the duel. The explanation for what the duel is over begins with Jean de Carrouges IV , a 14-century nobleman and squire living in the duchy of Normandy in northern France. He is a “born warrior” (13) who fought in the Hundred Years War between France and England.

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However, Carrouges is less successful at the court of his feudal overlord, Count Pierre of Alençon , a cousin of the king of France. He finds himself losing his lord’s favor to another nobleman and squire, Jacques Le Gris . In particular, Carrouges loses his claims to a lucrative estate called Aunou-le-Faucon to Le Gris. As a result, while Le Gris and Carrouges were once friends, they become rivals. Also, after the sudden deaths of his wife and only son and heir, Carrouges marries again to a younger woman, the heiress Marguerite de Thibouville .

Although they seem to reconcile at a wedding, the rivalry flared up again when Carrouges and Le Gris encountered each other at Count Pierre’s court. “With just a few angry or careless words flung at the squire in front of the other courtiers, Jean de Carrouges could easily have reopened old wounds and brought the dormant feud raging back to life” (60). With the help of one of his companions, Adam Louvel, Le Gris raped Marguerite while she was alone.

Knowing that his lord Count Pierre would protect Le Gris, Carrouges went to the king and Parlement of Paris to demand a trial by combat. It was an antiquated idea increasingly discouraged by the government of France. However, it was still an option, and the Parlement of Paris approved Carrouges’s request. Carrouges and Le Gris fought in a field at a monastery in Paris, Saint-Martin-des-Champes, before the royal court. The battle was close with Carrouges “wounded and bleeding in the field” (176). However, Carrouges turned the tide. After demanding Le Gris confess (which Le Gris refused to do), Carrouges killed him. By the rules of trial by combat, this vindicated Marguerite and proved Le Gris’s guilt in the rape.

Carrouges’ victory was celebrated, and he received several financial benefits from the king. However, he would attempt another lawsuit to claim Aunou-le-Faucon that would fail. Carrouges would go on to join a campaign against the Ottoman Empire and may have died at the Battle of Nicopolis, which took place in modern-day Bulgaria, or he was taken prisoner by the Ottomans and later killed. Few records remain showing what happened to Marguerite after her husband’s death. Her son Robert, although he may have been Le Gris’s biological son, did inherit the Carrouges estate. Later chronicles and modern historians believe that Marguerite later realized that her accusation against Le Gris was mistaken, but Eric Jager argues there is no proof of this. The Le Gris and Carrouges duel would go down in history as “the last judicial duel sanctioned by the Parlement of Paris” (198), although the custom persisted in several areas of France and Europe.

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• The True Story Behind <i>The Last Duel</i>—and History’s Attempt to Erase It

The True Story Behind The Last Duel —and History’s Attempt to Erase It

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Last Duel.

“Do you swear on your life that what you say is true?” This question, posed to Marguerite de Carrouges ( Jodie Comer ), encapsulates the true history behind The Last Duel , director Ridley Scott’s new film opening in theaters Oct. 15. Based on the 2004 book of the same name by Eric Jager, a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles and a specialist in medieval literature, the film uses its titular event—the last judicial duel in French history, held in Paris in December 1386—to delve deeply into the Middle Ages ’ complex politics of gender, female agency, religious morality and sexual ethics .

At the heart of The Last Duel lies a historical mystery, still not definitively solved over 600 years later: was the noblewoman Marguerite de Carrouges raped by the squire Jacques Le Gris? But beyond the mystery itself is the surprising way that Marguerite’s story was transformed and all but erased in the centuries after the events of the film, reinterpreted to serve intellectual agendas with little consideration for the life at the center of the tale. While The Last Duel offers some vindication to Marguerite, all that came next—the story of how her life was recorded and reshaped in the historical record—reveals both how easily marginalized voices can be removed from history even by historical figures we respect and how long it can take to restore those voices to their proper place.

Read more: The 23 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2021

A duel as the last resort to settle a life-or-death dispute

According to Marguerite, Le Gris (played in the film by Adam Driver ) traveled to her family’s chateau in Capomesnil where she was staying on January 18, 1386 and raped her. Marguerite had no one who could confirm her story : her husband Jean de Carrogues (played by Matt Damon ) had set out on a journey to Paris to collect some desperately needed funds and the servants were out for the day with Marguerite’s mother-in-law.

Despite the lack of witnesses, Le Gris certainly had motive and opportunity. In his personal life, Le Gris had a reputation as a philanderer. Le Gris and Jean had once been close friends, but their relationship turned to rivalry over a dispute regarding land Marguerite’s family owned. Shortly before Jean departed for Paris, he and Le Gris confronted one another in the court of Count Pierre d’Alençon (played by Ben Affleck ); Le Gris learned around this time that Jean would be leaving Marguerite alone.

Marguerite’s accusations carried serious ramifications for medieval French society. On the one hand, the punishment for rape, if proven, meant death for the culprit and dishonor for the rapist’s family. On the other, the punishment for false accusations was also death, via burning at the stake.

Attempting to win back the honor of his wife and family, Jean accused Le Gris of rape on Marguerite’s behalf to Pierre d’Alençon but, whether because Le Gris was a favorite of Pierre’s or because Pierre had feuded with Jean on the land dispute—or simply because he didn’t believe Marguerite—the count chalked Marguerite’s testimony up to a dream, a feminine flight of fancy. Enraged, Jean rode to Paris and appealed to King Charles VI, challenging Le Gris to a duel, an uncommon way for nobles to settle capital offenses. After months of futile investigation by the French courts, including Marguerite’s powerful testimony and a counter-witness by Le Gris, the courts had no other choice but to let the duel proceed, allowing God to decide the victor. As Jean Le Coq, Le Gris’ lawyer, wrote in his private diary, “No one really knew the truth of the matter.”

Though the real duel was between Le Gris and Jean, the film portrays the true conflict as Marguerite de Carrouges versus the political mores of her day, as she struggles to convince those around her, from the Church to her family to the French king to the common peasant, that what she says is true. The film splits its focus between Le Gris, Jean, and Marguerite, with Le Gris and Jean’s portions of the story written by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and Marguerite’s written by Nicole Holofcener. However, despite this split focus, Marguerite clearly emerges as the story’s true protagonist. Jodie Comer’s powerful performance not only does justice to the woman she’s portraying, but also makes her a strong contender for this year’s awards season. If the film missteps, it is because it does not allow Comer, and consequently Marguerite’s narrative, more screen time.

Read more: 15 Unsung Moments From American History That Historians Say You Should Know About

The story gets revised by Enlightenment thinkers

However, Scott’s Duel only depicts half of Marguerite’s story. Although Jean won the duel and succeeded in defending Marguerite’s honor, the event would take on a controversial life of its own in the following centuries. Within a few decades, period chroniclers disagreed about the duel’s details and disputed Le Gris’ guilt. Some wrote, as Jager recounts in Lapham’s Quarterly , that Jean only won because Le Gris “slipped on his opponent’s blood.” Others wrote about a supposed deathbed confession by a felon who, having a last-minute change of heart, admitted that he, not Le Gris, had raped Marguerite.

Enlightenment thinkers in the 18th century adopted this revision of Le Gris’ character to advance their own intellectual agendas. Positioning itself in contrast to the purportedly superstitious Middle Ages (now reimagined as the “Dark Ages”), the Enlightenment prized rationality above all else. Figures like Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire—considered by some modern historians an early feminist—made compelling cases for human rights, gender equality and the natural dignity of all peoples regardless of age, gender or race, which makes the Enlightenment’s widespread acceptance of the medieval narrative that Le Gris was innocent and refusal to consider Marguerite’s perspective all the more surprising and even hypocritical.

One of the Enlightenment’s most scathing critiques of the Middle Ages was of its violence, particularly in capital punishment. For some, Jacques Le Gris became a martyr, a man sentenced to a brutal death by a backwards and superstitious legal system which demonized him. One of the places Le Gris’ vindication emerged was in the Encyclopédie ; this project, spearheaded by Denis Diderot and Jacques d’Alembert, was one of the first modern encyclopedias and a text which articulated many of the Enlightenment’s most formative arguments. In the article on duels , lawyer Antoine-Gaspard Boucher d’Argis described how under “King Charles VI, [people] fought for so little,” offering as an example “the one he ordered in 1386 between Carrouges and Le Gris:”

the latter was accused by Carrouges’ wife of having made an attempt on her honor. Le Gris was killed in the fight and therefore found guilty; nevertheless, he was afterwards found innocent by the culprit of the crime, who declared Le Gris innocent as he laid dying. Before the duel, Le Gris had asked in all the monasteries of Paris that God should pray for him.

D’Argis’ account did not grapple with whether Marguerite’s testimony was valid, but instead chose to emphasize the duel’s injustice towards Le Gris and the futility of Le Gris’ prayers. Voltaire likewise, in his Histoire du Parlement de Paris , critiqued the brutality of the duel, as well as the fact that these duels, “regarded today as an unpardonable crime were always carried out with the sanction of the laws” and the Church. However, Voltaire only acknowledged Marguerite insofar as he claimed “all these fights were fought for women.” Neither D’Argis nor Voltaire mentioned Marguerite by name.

A revisionist history that served a broader agenda

Behind the Enlightenment’s exoneration of Le Gris were its arguments against the use of torture in judicial proceedings. According to Enlightenment scholar and University of Florida assistant professor of history Anton Matytsin, the Enlightenment sought “the end to judicial torture, the abolition of the death penalty, and the institution of proportional and humane punishments that would deter people from committing crimes … this is the main context in which they would have seen a duel: a barbaric way to settle a legal matter.” Cesare Beccaria, a leading Enlightenment thinker, “outlined how judicial torture primarily benefitted not those who were innocent and had nothing to confess but those whose physical constitutions would allow them to withstand pain.”

The Enlightenment’s celebration of Marguerite de Carrouges’ accused rapist challenges our notions of how history develops. While the Enlightenment looks more familiar to modern eyes than the more distant Middle Ages, intellectual and cultural development is not a straight line. While it is obvious now that Marguerite’s testimony deserved to be listened to , was wrongly downplayed in her own time and was ignored by later historians, for the Enlightenment’s intellectuals the story of France’s last duel was one of judicial injustice, not injustice towards women. Despite how much Marguerite de Carrouges’ tale resonates today, we must keep in mind L.P. Hartley’s words: “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

John-Paul Heil is a Ph.D candidate in early modern history at the University of Chicago and an adjunct professor of history and the liberal arts at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland. His scholarly work focuses on the intellectual history of virtue in Renaissance Naples. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Smithsonian , Los Angeles Review of Books and Comment . The author would like to thank Eric Jager for his correspondence regarding this piece.

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THE LAST DUEL: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial by Combat in Medieval France

Eric jager, . . broadway, $25.95 (256pp) isbn 978-0-7679-1416-1.

Reviewed on: 07/26/2004

Genre: Nonfiction

Open Ebook - 256 pages - 978-1-4070-7097-1

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The Last Duel review: A starry, brutal epic rises above its ridiculous hair

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Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

However unlucky you might have been in life, be glad you're not a lady living through the 14th century. There's not much that Jodie Comer 's Marguerite de Carrouges doesn't endure in The Last Duel , a movie that is about many things — love, war, the vagaries of the medieval French legal system — but mostly, in the end, male vanity. It's also helmed by Ridley Scott , a director who knows his way around mud and blood and adrenaline, and stacked with A-list actors who have obligingly done terrible things to their hair. Are you not entertained? You will be, but queasily, maybe: Duel is entirely, often sensationally watchable without ever quite justifying why it needs to remind us what the world has done to women for centuries. (Or how it chooses to do that by playing out an extended rape scene not once but twice.)

It begins, like so many cautionary tales do, at the end: With two noblemen, Jean de Carrouges ( Matt Damon ) and Jacques Le Gris ( Adam Driver ) preparing to fight to the death for Marguerite's honor. She's adamant that Le Gris took her against her will; he's adamant he never touched her. Jean is ostensibly there to defend his wife, but he and Jacques have a long history — which the movie soon unspools by retelling the story through several viewpoints, Rashomon style. First and perhaps least interesting is Jean's: A widowed squire with an honorable name but no money, he's a dedicated soldier of the young King Charles VI (played as a giggling, vaguely sociopathic princeling by Alex Lawther). What Jean lacks in charm and couth he makes up for on the battlefield, and his title is enough to win him the hand of Marguerite, a land-rich beauty whose father has somehow disgraced the Crown, slashing her chances of a better, wealthier match — or at least one who doesn't have a pitted scar running from his cheek to his chin line.

Jean and Jacques are actually old friends thanks to their time in the trenches together, though it's hard to see how they connect otherwise: Jean is blunt and boorish, with a tendency to take outraged offense at any perceived slight; Driver's Jacques is a dashing (pre-)Renaissance man who reads Latin and German and looks fantastic in a cape. It's clear who the king's cousin, Count Pierre d'Alencon ( Ben Affleck ) prefers, and his favor goes a long way. When he casually gifts a part of Marguerite's dowry to Jacques, Jean does not, unsurprisingly, take the news well. But the pair mostly manage to tamp down their animosity until the day Jacques surprises Marguerite alone at home, and the disputed incident takes place. She demands justice, though not the kind her husband has in mind; he wants to bypass judicial remedies and proceed directly to a duel.

As Jacques' and then finally Marguerite's version of events play out, some fuller picture of the truth, however subjective that may be, begins to coalesce. Damon and Affleck cowrote the screenplay with writer-director Nicole Holofcener ( Enough Said , Friends with Money ), which was probably wise; a story so centered on sexual assault without a woman's voice in the script would feel frankly gross in the year of our Lord 2021. It's impossible to tell of course exactly what each one's contribution was, though on screen at least, it's Affleck who gets to have the most fun: His debaucherous Count — a breezy libertine in gold brocade and fluffed blond bangs — lifts the movie every time he's in the frame. Damon happily forfeits his likability for the sour, spluttering Jean, and Driver, a brooding Byronic stomper, neatly toes the line between charlatan and hero.

Scott manages to fill in the finer brushstrokes of all those characters and still fit the kind of bravura action set pieces he's known for; the fight scenes are breathlessly, bone-crunchingly brutal. The film also feels like something vanishingly rare these days: a big-screen drama with budget and scope, richly told for grown adults. (That the accents veer freely from flutey Shakespearean British to flat California standard is somehow not nearly as distracting as it should be — or far less, at least, than Damon's honey-badger mullet). But the movie (in theaters Oct. 15) wouldn't be what it is without Comer: the Emmy-winning Killing Eve actress takes what could have been a bland damsel role and makes her furiously, incandescently real. Rape back then, tellingly, was considered not a sexual offense against the victim but a property crime done to her husband. "There is no right ," one character admonishes early on, "only the power of men." Duel is a sprawling, lavish testament to that, and all the things done in the name of ego, king, and country. But it's a woman who brings it home. Grade: B+

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The Last Duel Review: Flipping the He Said/She Said Script

I love her New York stories, but The Last Duel is the Nicole Holofcener historical epic we’ve long waited for. While The Last Duel will doubtlessly be celebrated—and rightly so—as a Ridley Scott film, its co-writer brings a uniquely sharp perspective to this adaptation of Eric Jager’s thrilling book. Working with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon—best buds in life, frenemies in the film—Holofcener and her colleagues deliver a tense drama that brings history into the present tense. It takes a 1386 case in which two men engaged in trial by combat as one man’s wife accused the other party of rape. While Jager’s book leaves no ambiguity about what befell Marguerite de Carrouges, the film takes a Rashômon – style consideration. Men are the unreliable narrators as the film implores us to believe women.

Marguerite’s perspective comes as a surprise as The Last Duel affords her respect and agency. The film, however, begins with the events seen from the perspective of husband. Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) is a noble knight, in his esteem, with his tale of courageous battles. The film builds to his eventual marriage to Marguerite (Jodie Comer) as Jean sees it as a well-earned reward for his valiant efforts. Battles are won, villages are taken, Scots are slain. All in the name of the king.

Significantly, Jean’s battles intersect with a greater war: his estranged friendship with squire Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver). No matter Jean’s valour, Jacques seems to get the best rewards while the knight suffers indignation. Jean, by his account, makes good by impressing Count Pierre (Ben Affleck) and speaking well before the king (Alex Lowther). And by wedding Marguerite, he finds some just rewards for his strength and sacrifices. Of course, until Jacques does his alleged deed.

He Said/He Said

The Last Duel flips the he said/she said duel formed by narratives of sexual violence as it lets the first competing accounts come from two men. Women at Marguerite’s time were considered property rather than people, so the violation thrown upon her ultimately registers as a slight against her husband. Jacques challenges the story that Jean hears in his tale: Marguerite matter-of-factly telling Jean that Jacques raped her while she was home alone.

In Jacques’ account, everything the audience saw from Jean’s perspective falls under question. What plays as a heroic battle charge in Jean’s mind becomes a scramble to correct poor judgment from Jacques’ perspective. Jean, a heroic knight by his account, is a bumbling doofus in Jacques’ eyes. But The Last Duel goes beyond the men comparing sizes. The film observes how people remember events differently, particularly traumatic ones. Lines of dialogue repeat in each chapter of The Last Duel , but different players speak them. Details differ. The men become unreliable narrators as their memories, motivations, and biases shape the histories they tell. The duel is a case is one man’s word against another.

It’s by this accord that Jean demands trial by combat to deliver justice—or, more aptly, to save face. The challenge demands the two men fight to the death. The he said/he said debate makes justice in the courts impossible, so God’s hand will presumably guide the just party to victory. The ruse of the battle, though, is that Marguerite’s fate is tied to Jean’s victory. As the party laying the charge, the law says that a loss by Jean proves Marguerite a liar and a sinner. She, too, will die if God sides with Jacques Le Gris.

Marguerite’s Story

The third perspective of The Last Duel brings things full Rashômon . Marguerite’s account plays out what happened in her bedchamber in full detail . No “ifs,” “ands,” or “buts” can interfere. But her account humorously challenges the perspectives of both men, as part three attributes previously seen virtues or previously uttered lines to new parties. As The Last Duel shifts from the male gaze to the female gaze, it shows how one’s gender, one’s status, and one’s experience filter the ways in which one sees the world. This film is a brilliant study of perspectives and the role of agency involved in the acts of both looking and being seen.

Comer generally plays a supporting role in the first two parts of the story, but Duel is Marguerite’s show. The Killing Eve star sheds all the sauciness that won her an Emmy for her breakthrough turn as Villanelle, yet Marguerite commands the trial with an assassin’s edge. Where her TV counterpart is icy and unhinged, Comer’s Marguerite is cool, poised, and unshakable. The Last Duel presents a thoroughly modern reading of history, but Marguerite’s ability to hold her ground under pressure makes it relevant. It’s Comer’s first leading film role and she truly has magnetic screen presence. As Marguerite resolves for the truth to come to light, she emerges the most credible narrator as Comer plays her with such conviction.

Casting Coups

The Last Duel really comes alive in its casting, though, as all the major roles are spot-on. Damon is perfectly suited for the husband who nurses wounded pride in some eyes and acts the cuckold in others. He plays Jean with the right mix of valour, humility, and humour, shifting the knight’s qualities according to the story’s point of view. Driver, similarly, finds unique ways of carrying Jacques according to the perspective through which his actions are filtered. He is Kylo Ren is one witness’s eyes, and Charlie Barber in another. Affleck, meanwhile, nearly steals the film as the skirt-chasing Count. In all three storytellers’ eyes, Pierre is an entitled playboy. Notably, Affleck’s humorous performance is the same from all three perspectives.

As the cast delivers three formidable storytellers who challenge one’s ways of weighing truth and reason, The Last Duel provides a tense build-up to the fateful duel. Even though Marguerite’s testimony is the most compelling, the events that precede the face-off are a chilling reminder that her fate is in God’s (re: the patriarchy’s) hands. This could play out any way. Ridley Scott finds himself in his element as he stages the battles and duelling perspectives of The Last Duel . The battles are tough and gritty, as the action, even in the earliest scenes, mirrors the duelling perspectives. This is a film of blows and counter-blows. It’s Scott’s best work as a director since Gladiator . Finding compelling character-driven warm-up rounds for the breathtaking and suspenseful action, The Last Duel proves an edge-of-your-seat test of nerves. It turns out the key to Scott’s kingdom was a feminine perspective.

The Last Duel opens in theatres on October 15.

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‘The Last Duel’ Review: A Medieval Epic in the Age of #MeToo

Ridley Scott and his all-star cast rip the moldy fig leaf off chivalric romance in a he-said, he-said, she-said spectacle.

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By Manohla Dargis

It’s no surprise that Ridley Scott, who’s made his share of swaggering manly epics, has directed what may be the big screen’s first medieval feminist revenge saga. In addition to his love for men with mighty swords, Scott has an affinity for tough women, women who are prickly and difficult and thinking, not bodacious cartoons. They’re invariably lovely, of course, but then everything in Ridley Scott’s dream world has an exalted shimmer.

Even the mud and blood gleam in “The Last Duel,” an old-style spectacle with a #MeToo twist. Based on the fascinating true story of a lady, a knight and a squire in 14th-century France, the story was big news back in the day and has been retrofitted to contemporary sensibilities by Scott and an unusual troika of screenwriters: Nicole Holofcener and two of the movie’s stars, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Together, they tear the moldy fig leaf off a Hollywood staple, the Arthurian-style romance — with its chivalric code, knightly virtues and courtly manners — to reveal a mercenary, transactional world of men, women and power. The result is righteously anti-romantic.

Damon, uglied up with slashing facial scars and a comically abject mullet, plays Jean de Carrouges, a nobleman down on his luck who makes ends meet by fighting on behalf of the king. The machinations start early and soon go into overdrive after he marries a younger woman, Marguerite (Jodie Comer), who brightens his life but doesn’t do much for his sour disposition or unfortunate grooming. Vainglorious and petty, his lips screwed into a pucker, Jean settles down with Marguerite but seethes over his friend turned antagonist, Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver, a juiced-up Basil Rathbone), a social climber aligned with Count Pierre, a licentious power player (Affleck, in debauched glory).

It’s a juicy lineup of familiar characters who are greedier and pettier than those that usually populate historical epics. But there is no noblesse oblige or courtly love, no dragons, witchy women or aggrandizing British accents. Instead, there are debts, grudges, fights, liaisons, an occasional naked nymph and men endlessly jockeying for position. Jean marries Marguerite to boost his prestige and wealth; Jacques enriches himself by currying favor with Pierre. For her part, Marguerite is passed from father to husband, who later, in a startling moment, commands her to kiss Jacques in public as evidence of Jean’s resumed good will toward his frenemy. It’s a catastrophic gesture.

The story’s action is visceral and relentless; the atmosphere gray and thick with intrigue. Scott likes to throw a lot on the screen — the movie churns with roaring men, galloping horses, shrieking minions — which can clutter up a story but here creates insistent momentum. This churn throws the quieter bits into relief, giving you room to breathe and the characters time to scheme. These lulls also allow the filmmakers to lay out some of the brute details of everyday life in the Middle Ages, even for a noble like Jean who slogs off to war for money. In this world of homosocial relations, men continually and often violently negotiate their place among other men, and always for gain.

The script is solid, shrewd and fairly faithful to its source material, Eric Jager’s nonfiction page-turner “The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal and Trial by Combat.” The crime in question was the alleged rape in 1386 of the wife of one noble by another of lesser rank. Her husband presented the case to Charles VI , demanding the right to a judicial duel, or trial by combat. If the husband wins it ostensibly proves the truth of his claim, a.k.a. God’s will. Die or yield, he is guilty; if he survives, he will be hanged, and his wife burned alive. As Jager emphasizes, rape was a crime in medieval Europe, even punishable by death, but it wasn’t a crime against the woman but her male guardian.

Jager gives the three figures at the center of this drama their due, although, like the medieval text that inspired him, his account is weighted toward the dueling noblemen. The movie tries to more emphatically foreground Marguerite by making her a relatively equal participant in her own tragedy. It does this on a structural level by dividing the story into chapters and placing her version of events alongside those of the two men: he said, he said, she said. This splitting evokes “Rashomon,” in which various characters narrate the same crime — also a rape — from conflicting points of view, creating a sense of relative truth. But there’s no such ambiguity in “The Last Duel.”

Rape as a plot device has a long, grotesque history; it’s useful for metaphors and shocks but rarely has anything to do with women, their bodies or pain. In presenting Marguerite’s point of view — everything shifts meaningfully in her version, including how she sees her husband and the assault — “The Last Duel” seeks to upend that tradition. It doesn’t fully succeed and the movie still leans toward the men, their actions and stratagems. Partly this is a problem of history. As a 14th-century woman, Marguerite is bred to acquiesce and, for the most part, is acted upon rather than acts. While the movie is feminist in intent and in meaning, and though she’s given narrative time, she remains frustratingly opaque, without the inner life to balance the busily thrashing men.

“The Last Duel” works best as an autopsy of corrosive male power, which creates a certain amount of unresolved tension given how much Scott enjoys putting that power on display, including during the duel. The movie is weirdly entertaining, but the world it presents, despite its flourishes of comedy, is cold, hard and unforgiving. Few come out looking good, not the antagonists or giggly king (Alex Lawther), the conniving clergyman or Jean’s unsympathetic mother (Harriet Walter), a proxy for every woman who’s ever told other women to shut up and take it. Marguerite didn’t, but however blurrily history remembers her, she made her mark with a vengeance.

The Last Duel Rated R for sexual violence and the usual medieval barbarism. Running time: 2 hours 32 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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The Last Duel Review: Ridley Scott’s Most Timely Historical Epic

The Last Duel, Ridley Scott’s gripping and bloody historical epic, relates an incident from three different points of view. Which works, even if that may be one view too many.

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Ridley Scott loves his historical dramas: from Gladiator to Kingdom of Heaven , to even his stony faced Robin Hood , the director may be the last filmmaker still interested in making classic Hollywood epics based at least on partially real-life ancient events or figures. What perhaps differentiates his latest such film, The Last Duel , from some of those others mentioned above is that this time, the story is directly relevant to today, even if it takes a while for Scott to get to the point.

Based on a book by Eric Jager of the same name, which chronicled certain events in late 14th century Normandy, The Last Duel stars Matt Damon as Jean de Carrouges, a knight and landowner known for his courage on the battlefield in service of the King. Carrouges is friends with Jacques Le Gris ( Adam Driver ), a somewhat more cultured nobleman who has caught the attention of the King’s cousin, a local count named Pierre d’Alencon ( Ben Affleck ).

Carrouges’ and Le Gris’ friendship is strained, however, when d’Alencon sides with Le Gris in a dispute over a parcel of land originally promised to Carrouges by Sir Robert de Thibouville (Nathaniel Parker), the father of Carrouges’ young bride Marguerite (Jodie Comer). The land is awarded to Le Gris by d’Alencon, who also puts the squire in charge of his affairs. Carrouges is further humiliated when he’s expelled from the court after losing his temper. But the worst is yet to come.

After Carrouges returns from another military campaign, he is informed by Marguerite that Le Gris turned up at their home and raped her. Le Gris denies the charges, but Carrouges takes his complaint all the way to King Charles VI (Alex Lawther), who authorizes a trial by combat—a duel to the death—between Carrouges and Le Gris to determine which side speaks the truth. But what Carrouges does not tell his wife until the showdown is set is that that if he loses, Marguerite herself faces a horrific fate beyond imagining.

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The Last Duel takes the Rashomon route of telling the story from three different points of view, or each person’s “truth.” The first section is told from Carrouges’ perspective and, of course, paints Damon’s prickly knight in the most flattering light as a dedicated soldier, loving husband, and loyal friend who is betrayed at every turn but who nevertheless believes and supports his wife, unconditionally. The second portion of the film is Le Gris’ version of events, in which Carrouges is seen as a self-pitying pariah, and Marguerite’s response to Le Gris’ assault is, just slightly , more ambivalent.

The third portion of the film belongs to Marguerite, and in the end, that is the only truth that matters. While the men bicker and puff themselves up and nurse their wounded egos and pride, she is the one who has been truly violated and the one who has the most courage, since she speaks up—and never backs down—during a time when the consequences for her are literally life and agonizing death.

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Ben Affleck Talks Working with Matt Damon Again in The Last Duel

The Last Duel ’s power comes from the way that Marguerite’s struggle to be heard and to have the truth come out is almost a mirror image of the way events have played out in modern times and in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Fortunately, Comer — the fantastic Killing Eve actor on the rise — skirts the limitations of the script to make Marguerite a fully formed human being. The problem is that she only gets to this mainly in the third act, during “her” story, and she remains a cypher earlier in the film.

The first two sections are devoted to the men, and even though the events are mostly the same, there are subtle differences throughout: Damon’s Carrouges becomes less of a hero and more of a self-absorbed hothead as the film goes on (“Why does this man do nothing but evil to me?” he screams in the third section, after his wife, the actual victim, informs him of the rape). Meanwhile the predator beneath Le Gris’ slick veneer recedes in his recollection of events (Marguerite put up the “customary protests,” he tells d’Alencon at first, implying that the rest was just fine).

The script was co-written by Damon, Affleck, and Enough Said director-writer Nicole Holofcener, with each handling a specific character’s tale. And even though much of The Last Duel is gripping as drama and rich in subtext, one wishes that there was a way to somehow combine the first two sections so that this two-and-a-half hour film could get to the heart of the matter—one lonely woman’s stand for the truth in a time when her voice was barely acknowledged—just a bit sooner.

Nevertheless, there’s a lot of powerful material here, and Scott seems to be his most focused since 2015’s The Martian . The period details, costumes, and settings are pretty much on point throughout (a couple of dodgy CG landscapes or crowd scenes aside), and the director is aided enormously by his remarkably assured and superb cast. We were initially filled with dread at the idea of Damon and Affleck in period wigs , but Damon brings a lot of shading to the different views of Carrouges while Affleck is surprisingly strong and genuinely funny as the decadent, dissolute d’Alencon. Driver is excellent as always; he seems like the kind of timeless actor who can handle almost anything. And Comer centers the movie with a quietly moving power in her Marguerite.

It’s no spoiler to say that the film climaxes with the title conflict, a gory, grueling, and ugly battle that reduces Carrouges and Le Gris to grunting, clawing savages (if the real-life duel was anything like this, it’s probably no wonder that it was the last trial by combat ever officially sanctioned in France). If this is the way that justice used to be meted out, with “God” deciding the winner, then we can probably say that we’ve made at least a little progress. But at a time when women’s private medical decisions are treated in some parts of this country like criminal acts, The Last Duel reaches back into the past for a forceful reminder that we haven’t come far enough.

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The Last Duel is out in theaters this Friday, Oct. 15.

Don Kaye | @donkaye

Don Kaye is an entertainment journalist by trade and geek by natural design. Born in New York City, currently ensconced in Los Angeles, his earliest childhood memory is…

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Movie Reviews

'the last duel' is a 'rashomon'-style #metoo story — and a messy medieval epic.

Justin Chang

Adam Driver and Matt Damon play real-life combatants Jacques Le Gris and Sir Jean de Carrouges in The Last Duel. Patrick Redmond/20th Century Studios via AP hide caption

Adam Driver and Matt Damon play real-life combatants Jacques Le Gris and Sir Jean de Carrouges in The Last Duel.

The Last Duel is a sprawling, often ungainly movie — a talky, three-part Rashomon -style drama that mixes past and present-day politics — but there's a bracing intelligence to its messiness. It opens the way a lot of Ridley Scott period epics do, on a gloomy day with two sides preparing for battle.

We're in Paris in the year 1386, and the combatants are the dashing squire Jacques Le Gris — that's Adam Driver — and the sullen knight Sir Jean de Carrouges — that's Matt Damon . Jean's wife, Marguerite, played by Jodie Comer, watches anxiously from her seat. Just as the two men are about to clash lances, the movie cuts away and rewinds several years to show what brought these three characters to this moment.

There's a lot more rewinding to come. The Last Duel is based on a true story that it tells no fewer than three times, each time from a different character's perspective. The script, adapted from Eric Jager's nonfiction book , emerged from a unique collaboration among three writers. Damon and Ben Affleck wrote the first two chapters focusing on the men, while Nicole Holofcener wrote the third chapter centering on Marguerite. It's an ingenious approach to what plays like a medieval #MeToo story, tackling the dynamics of power, class and gender in an era when women were regarded as little more than male property.

The opening chapter focuses on Carrouges, played by Damon with a righteous scowl and a mullet so hideous it almost immediately turns you against him. Carrouges is a brave warrior from a long line of brave warriors, but also a proud, petty man with a chip on his shoulder. We first see him and Le Gris in 1370, fighting valiantly against the English and becoming close friends. But Carrouges begins to feel resentful when their superior — Count Pierre d'Alençon, a saucy libertine played hilariously by Affleck — takes Le Gris under his wing. The count even gives Le Gris a coveted piece of land that was originally intended for Carrouges as part of his wife Marguerite's dowry, leading to years of legal struggles.

Then one evening, Marguerite comes forward and tells her husband that while he was away, Le Gris came to their castle in Normandy and raped her. Carrouges takes the accusation public, setting in motion a duel between himself and Le Gris, which would become the last trial by combat officially recognized in France.

At this point, the first chapter ends and the movie returns to the beginning, this time replaying events from Le Gris' perspective. As one of the count's closest allies, Le Gris has come to enjoy a life of privilege and debauchery, and Driver basically plays him as God's gift to women. That stokes his tensions with Carrouges, who eventually is made a knight and demands that Le Gris show him respect.

Around this time, Le Gris falls madly in love with Marguerite and becomes certain that she reciprocates his feelings. That brings us to their fateful encounter, in which Le Gris convinces himself that Marguerite's protests are merely the signs of a guilty conscience. But even though the movie is showing us his version of events, it rejects his delusion completely: What we see is unmistakably a sexual assault, in which Marguerite repeatedly says no and tries to push him away.

The third chapter, which unfolds from Marguerite's perspective, revisits the rape scene, and for some viewers — fair warning — it may seem like one grueling replay too many, especially since Marguerite's trauma is now even more apparent. But this is also the chapter in which the moral arc of the story snaps into focus. After so much boorish male behavior, fully embodied by Damon and Driver, the fierce intelligence and humanity of Comer's performance is like a balm. Marguerite emerges as by far the most honest and clear-eyed of the movie's three leads, heroic in her refusal to stay silent about what she endured.

Near the end of the film, Marguerite finds herself on trial, forced to defend her rape allegation in a court full of men trying to discredit her. The sequence plays like dark satire, suggesting how much has changed and also how much hasn't. And then there's the duel, which feels almost subversively anticlimactic: It delivers all the gory virtuosity you'd expect from Ridley Scott, but something about it rings deliberately hollow. It hardly matters which man wins, the movie seems to be saying, in a world where women are destined to lose.

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“The Last Duel,” Reviewed: Ridley Scott’s Wannabe #MeToo Movie

By Richard Brody

Apparently, a good man was hard to find in the Middle Ages. At least, there aren’t any on hand in Ridley Scott’s new film, “The Last Duel” (now in theatres), which is set in France in the late fourteenth century, amid the ruinous Hundred Years’ War and social disturbances in the wake of the Black Death. Its duelling male protagonists—whose joust to the death, on December 29, 1386, is both the movie’s framing device and dénouement—are bums with asterisks. Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), an aristocrat and a respected warrior, took part in the Battle of Limoges, against English troops, in 1370, and proved both insubordinate and reckless. Defying orders to hold fire, he bravely yet vainly led a charge that was defeated. His life was saved in that dubious battle by his friend Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), a squire, educated and suave and no less courageous in battle, but also a notorious womanizer and a courtier to Count Pierre d’Alençon (Ben Affleck), a sybarite and a libertine who relied on Le Gris to keep his accounts and tweak his wardrobe and join in his debauchery.

The details of their failings are fascinating—and historically documented. The poor, peevish, and litigious Carrouges married, for her dowry, Marguerite de Thibouville (Jodie Comer), the daughter of the disgraced aristocrat Robert de Thibouville (Nathaniel Parker), who’d been a treasonous sympathizer of the English, and, when one of the lands in the dowry ended up in the hands of Le Gris, Carrouges sued. Le Gris gained Pierre’s confidence by volunteering as a tax collector whose practices the film depicts as a medieval and aristocratic forebear to Mafia shakedowns—and whose efforts extorted the coveted property from Robert. Frozen out of Pierre’s court, Carrouges (prompted by the wise counsel of Marguerite) reconciles, at a celebration, with Le Gris—who, with his flirtatious ways and literary learning, there engages the similarly educated Marguerite in a conversation that, for her, is a red flag and, for him, a wellspring of unreciprocated desire. Years later, after winning his knighthood in Scotland during another failed expedition, Carrouges returns home, then heads to Paris to collect funds due him—and, while he’s away, Le Gris (gaining entrance to the Carrouges castle thanks to the deceit of his squire, Adam Louvel, played by Adam Nagaitis) declares his love for Marguerite and, when she rejects him, chases her to her bedroom and rapes her. Then, when Marguerite accuses him of rape—and when Carrouges spreads word of it far and wide—it’s Pierre who counsels Le Gris to “Deny, deny, deny,” because it’s Pierre who, corruptly, serves as judge, hears the charges, and summarily finds for his friend and enabler Le Gris.

In this gallery of woeful men, the one who displays the hardiest core of virtue amid his many conspicuous failings is Carrouges. He believes Marguerite when she says that Le Gris raped her and, after the acquittal by Pierre, he appeals to the frivolous, smirking king—Charles VI (Alex Lawther), a.k.a. Charles the Mad, another woeful piece of work—for the right to duel Le Gris, a battle that was believed to embody God’s judgment. Thus, if Carrouges kills Le Gris, he is presumed to have proved the case; but if Le Gris kills Carrouges, Marguerite, too, will be punished—burned at the stake on the presumption that her sworn testimony was perjured. (According to the warped laws of the time, as the drama makes clear, rape wasn’t considered a violent crime against the female victim but a property crime against her husband, her so-called guardian.)

All bums—and all real-life people. The story is based on a copious historical record (dating back to Froissart’s “Chronicles,” which are nearly contemporaneous with the events) and the script—by Nicole Holofcener , Affleck, and Damon—is adapted from a recent work of history, “ The Last Duel ,” by the literary scholar Eric Jager. The movie is built in three long chapters, each labelled “The Truth According to” Carrouges, Le Gris, and Marguerite, respectively (though the filmmakers tip their hand by leaving the title card for Marguerite’s chapter a bit longer, while effacing all the words but two: “The truth”). Yet the construction of the film isn’t exactly “Rashomon”-like; it doesn’t show three completely different versions of the events as much as it shows the same events from three perspectives, with the addition of new facts left out by the other two. Taken together, the three segments tell something like the over-all story, including the characters’ different interpretations of what happened.

Because of its he-said, she-said premise, “The Last Duel” has been hailed as something of a #MeToo movie in a medieval setting. In the sharpest dialogue in the film, Carrouges’s shrewish mother (Harriet Walter) blames Marguerite for making the rape claim; she tells her daughter-in-law that she, too, was raped when she was young and said nothing—not least, so as not to force her husband into a battle of honor. She also notes that their fate, as ladies, is no different from that of peasant women who are raped by soldiers in conquered lands—a subject that ought to have opened a large new dimension in the movie’s dialogue and the women’s relationship.

There is no such extended conversation between mother and daughter. For that matter, there’s hardly any talk worth hearing in the entire movie.The bit of ornamentally expressive dialogue that there is—Le Gris’s reading and extemporaneous translation of cynical Latin aphorisms about love, and his literary discussion with Marguerite (partly in German, about the thirteenth-century romance “Parzival”)—merely serves to advance their semblance of a friendship. There’s a reason that Shakespeare endures: he gave warriors and ladies of the court, no less than their rulers and their fools, copious inner lives and glorious words to express them with. The gruff and taciturn Carrouges, who’s illiterate, is given little to say—except when it comes to the merits of horseflesh. Elsewhere the curt dialogue features absurdly stilted Hollywood medievalese (with clumsy accents and inflections to match) and laughable anachronisms (as when Carrouges, preparing to go to battle, tells Marguerite, “This is what I do .”) Marguerite in particular is diminished by the paltry script. Without warfare and court business for her to engage in, the movie has little to show beside brief depictions of her thoughtful and successful efforts to fulfill (and to improve on) her husband’s administrative functions in his absence.

Scott’s filming is similarly both bombastic and flimsy. Several hurried battle scenes of armored warriors hacking away at one another’s chain mail suggest the unromantic brutality of medieval warfare, but they do so with neither character nor humanity. The depiction of the climactic duel is much more extensive yet no less generalized and anecdotal. The images are more hacked up than the bodies. There’s little choreographic sense (a shame, because the bit that there is, during head-on horse charges, is terrifying and thrilling for a fraction of a second) and, though I’m sure that Damon and Driver did plenty of swordplay rehearsal, Scott merely amps up and draws out suspense with little apparent interest in observing, parsing, and conveying their physicality.

The most disturbing and dissonant aspect of “The Last Duel” involves the filming of the sexual crime at its center. The assault is shown twice; the first time, in Le Gris’s chapter, in which he takes his pleasure and the soundtrack conveys what sounds like sighs and moans of pleasure from Marguerite. (At the hearing to determine whether Carrouges will have royal leave to duel Le Gris, Marguerite is asked whether she took pleasure from the encounter; she says no.) In Marguerite’s chapter—the one labelled “the truth”—the rape is shown a second time. During the scene of Le Gris forcing his way, through deception, into the castle, and forcing his way, through speed and strength, into Marguerite’s bedroom, I was gripped with unease—not with horror but with a queasy sense of witnessing a visual exploitation of that horror. Would we really be made to watch the rape again? Indeed, and this time, while Le Gris is forceably penetrating Marguerite, Scott shows her face, in closeup, and reveals that she’s crying.

What is the purpose of an image? That question is the very subject of “The Last Duel”: most rapists leave no photographic evidence of their crime, which is why the very notion of whose claim gets credence is central to achieving moral and legal redress. Scott depicts the events of the story literally—and he even declares, with the title labelling Marguerite’s perspective “the truth,” that he, too, believes her. Yet if he’d had the courage of his belief—and the cinematic artistry and, even more, the cinematic ethic—he could have chosen not to show the rape even once. He could have put the cinematic onus on the viewer—and, more important, on himself—to affirm that Le Gris raped Marguerite, to believe her not because Scott himself created his own image of ostensible veracity to justify and prove her claim but because she said so. Instead, “The Last Duel” is a wannabe #MeToo movie, the cavalier abuse of experience at six centuries’ remove.

An earlier version of this post misstated the name of the character who forced his way into the castle.

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Over the decades, Ridley Scott has made several period films that are widely regarded as classics. More than several, if you expand your horizons to include films set in the future in the category of “period.” But with Scott period is not a guarantee of pleasure. Not that any of his pictures have lacked for quality if you associate quality with production value and snazzy shooting and cutting. But sometimes Scott fails to put a sense of life on the screen. While “ Gladiator ” and “ Kingdom of Heaven ” throbbed with purposeful vitality, pictures such as “Robin Hood” and “1492: Conquest of Paradise” seemed to lack much of a reason for being.

Scott’s “The Last Duel” may not be perfect but it never exhibits such inertia. This medieval intrigue comes courtesy of an unusual combination of talents: its screenplay, which is indeed based on true Medieval Events, is by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (collaborating as writers, or at least as credited writers, for the first time since “ Good Will Hunting ”) and by Nicole Holofcener , best known for contemporary dramatic comedies with satiric bite and female-centered perspectives. Set in 14 th century France, it casts Damon and Affleck in central roles in a story about egocentric men playing at power and subjugating women, all the while using cardboard conceptions of concepts such as duty, loyalty, and fealty to God as the pretexts for their petty, criminal actions.

After a prologue presenting the beginning of the title duel—a match to the death between squires and one-time friends Sir Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris (Damon and an especially tense-necked Adam Driver , respectively)—the movie takes a “ Rashomon ”-inspired structure. The first “Truth According To Chapter” belongs to Damon’s de Carrouges. In this episode Jean kicks things off by saving Jacques’ life at the Battle of Limoges. Then he goes on to do other noble things, despite the disdain in which he is held by his liege, Pierre d’Alençon (Affleck). He marries the beautiful daughter of a one-time traitor, goes off to battle without hesitation, that sort of thing. All the while watching Le Gris rise higher and higher in the court and swallowing his pride when Le Gris is awarded land and titles he believed rightfully his. They fall in and out with each other. But they fall definitively out when Marguerite, Jean’s wife ( Jodie Comer ), accuses Le Gris of rape.

And—I don’t think this actually constitutes a spoiler, but if you’re wary, maybe skip this paragraph—rape it most certainly is. The next chapter tells the truth according to Le Gris. In this account, Jean is a petulant, inappropriate whiner whose butt Le Gris is always covering; d’Alençon has little if any use for the squire. As for Marguerite, Le Gris “sincerely” loves her. This ruthless pragmatist is a man, and is thus, by his way of thinking, entitled to take her. When the devoutly Catholic rapist confesses to a priest, he admits not to rape but to “adultery.” Advising him on his upcoming legal troubles, another cleric tells him “Rape is not a crime against a woman. It is a property matter.”

The third chapter is billed as “The Truth According To Marguerite de Carrouges” and to drive a point home, the words “the truth” stay up longer on this title card than they do on the preceding. This is a lacerating sequence in which both Jean and Jacques are shown as chest-thumping brutes and opportunists. Jean believes he was tender to his bride; Marguerite’s section tells mostly of how he bickered with Marguerite’s father over her dowry. And so on. This telling repeats the rape scene, which is arguably necessary but uncomfortable—and of course that may be the point. What fascinates in these different perspectives are the small details—how one character remembers a brief kiss differently than another, how a pair of shoes removed daintily at the bottom of a stair in one telling becomes shoes falling off feet as the stairs are mounted in a panicked rush.

And it all leads up to the title duel which, even by the high standards set by Scott’s “Gladiator,” is what you’d call a humdinger.

There are plenty of nits one can pick about this picture. While Driver and Comer almost automatically fit into the movie’s world of lances and horses and castles (and various views of Notre Dame Cathedral while under construction), Damon and Affleck are harder period sells. Especially with Affleck going blond here. No performer commits any outright fouls—the screenplay has them all speaking an only slightly treated form of American colloquial English, so there are no Shakespearean pitfalls present. But it’s certain that connoisseurs of the “Sad Affleck” meme are gonna go to town once they can start getting screen shots from this movie.

Then of course there’s the “how feminist is it, anyway?” question. I could say “more than a little,” given that its observations pertaining to still-current issues land with some force and are arguably fortified in the context of medieval hypocrisy and barbarity. Nevertheless, while “The Last Duel” may be a partial model of mindfulness, it still obeys the requirements of the period action drama. This should surprise no one—this is a major studio multi-million dollar production overseen by a director whose work has only rarely skirted feisty indie territory. And let’s not forget that when he has, it’s been with just as mixed a bag of results as he’s had throughout his career—I’m thinking “ Thelma and Louise ” on the credit side and “A Good Year” on the debit.

When it’s delivering what the best of Scott and company's work can do—and the imagery, much of it grounded in a palette that could be a tribute to its anti-hero, whose last name translates as “the gray,” is frequently startling—the commentary pursued by the movie’s scenario isn’t entirely subsumed, but it’s not paramount, either. 

Exclusively in theaters Friday, October 15th.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Last Duel (2021)

Rated R for strong violence including sexual assault, sexual content, some graphic nudity, and language.

153 minutes

Jodie Comer as Marguerite de Carrouges

Matt Damon as Jean de Carrouges

Adam Driver as Jacques Le Gris

Ben Affleck as Count Pierre d'Alençon

Marton Csokas as Crespin

Harriet Walter as Nicole de Bouchard

Clare Dunne as Celia

• Ridley Scott
• Ben Affleck
• Nicole Holofcener

Cinematographer

• Dariusz Wolski
• Claire Simpson
• Harry Gregson-Williams

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• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

The Last Duel review – Affleck, Damon and Driver deliver damp mullets in the fog

An all-star cast and some showstoppingly horrible hair can’t save Ridley Scott’s medieval epic

D uelling got Ridley Scott into cinema back in 1977 with his much-admired debut The Duellists , but that was a brisk affair of rapiers at dawn. Medieval jousting is likely to be more cumbersome and clanking, and so it is in The Last Duel. Scott is revered as one of cinema’s most versatile mainstreamers but, barring Gladiator , his historical epics have tended not to win much adoration – something that is unlikely to change with this account of a real-life 14th-century case of rape and rivalry.

The feud is between nobles Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), who fall out after the latter wins the favour of Count Pierre d’Alençon (Ben Affleck), with De Carrouges losing his destined captaincy and a desired piece of land, part of his promised dowry in his marriage to Marguerite de Thibouville (Jodie Comer). The film begins in 1386, with the men beginning armoured combat in front of King Charles VI, then jumps back to trace the story up to the point when Marguerite tells her husband that Le Gris has raped her.

The plot is told in three parts, each recounting the events from the viewpoint of a particular character – Jean, Jacques and Marguerite – and each scripted by one of three writers in turn. They are Damon, Affleck and, most intriguingly, Nicole Holofcener, best known as the US indie auteur behind crisp female-centred comedies such as Enough Said and Lovely and Amazing . The third chapter, under Holofcener’s charge, is most interesting in opening up Marguerite’s viewpoint and overturning the feudal male perspective of the earlier instalments. Holofcener’s section also provides the wryest line – after a drab bout of functional marital sex, Jean politely enquires: “I trust your ‘little death’ was a memorable and a productive one.”

However, by the time the film gets round to showing its hand as an episode of Medieval #MeToo, it has numbed us with so much flash and fustian that the heart of the story has almost been drowned. Marguerite’s story could have made a fascinating, somewhat Shavian drama if only the grandiose spectacle (and the 152-minute running time) had been stripped back. As it is, you quickly tire of the mud, metal and permanently medieval weather: if it’s not snowing, everything’s steeped in mist. And it takes a considerable leap of faith to get over Damon’s mullet and bogbrush beard, less 14th-century knight than 1990s nu-metal bro .

Damon is solidly cantankerous as Jean; Driver does a Byronic, cape-swirling act that suggests he might be using his role as a dry run for a stage Richard III; Comer, though she holds the attention, gives a performance a little too restrained to fully animate a thinly conceived role. Affleck, though, has fun, uttering some of the sillier lines (“Come in, take your pants off”) as a platinum-haired lord who runs his chateau like the Playboy Mansion. Otherwise, my liege, neither memorable nor productive.

• Venice film festival 2021
• Venice film festival
• Ridley Scott
• Adam Driver
• Ben Affleck

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The Last Duel

2021, History/Drama, 2h 33m

What to know

Critics Consensus

The Last Duel 's critique of systemic misogyny isn't as effective as it might have been, but it remains a well-acted and thought-provoking drama infused with epic grandeur. Read critic reviews

Audience Says

If you don't mind its somewhat repetitive story structure, The Last Duel is an exciting, well-acted period drama that leaves you with plenty to think about. Read audience reviews

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The last duel videos, the last duel   photos.

The Last Duel is a cinematic and thought-provoking drama set in the midst of the Hundred Years War that explores the ubiquitous power of men, the frailty of justice and the strength and courage of one woman willing to stand alone in the service of truth. Based on actual events, the film unravels long-held assumptions about France's last sanctioned duel between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris, two friends turned bitter rivals. Carrouges is a respected knight known for his bravery and skill on the battlefield. Le Gris is a Norman squire whose intelligence and eloquence make him one of the most admired nobles in court. When Carrouges' wife, Marguerite, is viciously assaulted by Le Gris, a charge he denies, she refuses to stay silent, stepping forward to accuse her attacker, an act of bravery and defiance that puts her life in jeopardy. The ensuing trial by combat, a grueling duel to the death, places the fate of all three in God's hands.

Rating: R (Sexual Assault|Language|Sexual Content|Some Graphic Nudity|Strong Violence)

Genre: History, Drama

Original Language: English

Director: Ridley Scott

Producer: Ridley Scott , Kevin J. Walsh , Jennifer Fox , Nicole Holofcener

Writer: Nicole Holofcener , Ben Affleck , Matt Damon

Release Date (Theaters): Oct 15, 2021  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Nov 30, 2021

Box Office (Gross USA): $10.8M

Runtime: 2h 33m

Distributor: 20th Century Studios

Production Co: TSG Entertainment, 20th Century Studios, Scott Free Productions, Pearl Street Films

Sound Mix: Dolby Atmos

Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)

Cast & Crew

Jean de Carrouges

Adam Driver

Jacques LeGris

Jodie Comer

Marguerite de Carrouges

Ben Affleck

Count Pierre d'Alençon

Marton Csokas

Harriet Walter

Nicole de Buchard

Nathaniel Parker

Sir Robert D'Thibouville

Alex Lawther

King Charles VI

Clare Dunne

Ridley Scott

Nicole Holofcener

Screenwriter

Kevin J. Walsh

Jennifer Fox

Executive Producer

Madison Ainley

Kevin Halloran

Drew Vinton

Dariusz Wolski

Cinematographer

Claire Simpson

Film Editing

Harry Gregson-Williams

Original Music

Production Design

Loïc Chavanon

Art Director

Set Decoration

Janty Yates

Costume Design

News & Interviews for The Last Duel

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Matt Damon, Ben Affleck Praise the ‘Fearlessness’ of Jodie Comer in The Last Duel

Critic Reviews for The Last Duel

Audience reviews for the last duel.

The opening of The Last Duel harkens back to the first scene of one of my favorite movies of all time, Gladiator. We see two opposing armies face off on a dreary battlefield as a decapitated head signals the beginning of the end. Other than the fact that both movies are about a "protagonist" seeking revenge and redemption for a despicable act, the character and morale compasses of the male "heroes" couldn't be more different. Ultimately, it's about three different perspectives of the same events. More importantly, it's three points of view of the depiction of rape, a crime as heinous as murder, and a topic that modern filmmakers continue to try and fail to handle deftly (Last Night in Soho being the most recent example of a terrible portrayal). I've said this before and I'll say it again: as a Gen X male, I am not qualified to properly analyze or discuss this subject in detail. Matt Damon, Adam Driver, Judie Comer and Ben Affleck all put in excellent performances, but the standout by far is Comer. The only reason I kept watching Killing Eve as continued to spiral into mediocrity was for Judie Comer's quirky and charismatic assassin. She was also one of the best things about Free Guy. I think I could watch her painting a wall just to see how she subtly conveys emotion – the slight uplift of the corner of her mouth as she expresses amusement. But she displays a full range of emotions here, making you feel like more than a passive observer to the heinous act that is inflected upon her. The actual scene of the "last duel" is as brutal and visceral as it should be. And I have to admire Ridley Scott for his career stamina. At 84, he doesn't shy away from a difficult subject matter, and while everybody has been sheltering-at-home for the last 1.5 years, he' released two award-season contenders. He apparently took Dylan Thomas's poem to heart: "Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.(x)

Initially I wished the movie embraced a little more more ambiguity however that would likely rob the titular duel of its incredible tension and high stakes. Performances are good all around and I love that the whole thing is a total bummer.

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Screen Rant

Ben affleck's upcoming sequel to $155m movie will break his great recent career trend.

Although Ben Affleck is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, the actor's upcoming sequel to a $155 million movie breaks one of his recent trends.

• Ben Affleck returns as Christian Wolff in The Accountant 2, breaking his recent trend of supporting roles.
• The sequel will focus on Christian and Braxton's relationship, possibly giving Bernthal a bigger role.
• Affleck's willingness to do a sequel shows faith in the project, hinting at The Accountant 2's potential success.

Ben Affleck's The Accountant 2 is the upcoming sequel to its 2016 predecessor, and while there are limited details available regarding The Accountant 2 's plot, it will break a recent career trend for the beloved actor. With The Accountant 2 in development , it will mark Affleck's return as Christian Wolff, a mathematical savant embroiled in crime, while also breaking his most recent career trend. Many of the original cast and characters from The Accountant are also returning to The Accountant 2 , which furthers the excitement for the less popular action thriller's upcoming sequel.

Although not as recognizable among general audiences, The Accountant is one of Ben Affleck's best movies , and its depiction of someone on the autism spectrum, well-written characters, engaging story, and thrilling action highlight its greatest. While some of Affleck's more popular movies, like Good WIll Hunting and Pearl Harbor are more recognizable among moviegoers, neither movie has a sequel . Furthermore, given the caliber of work that Affleck has committed to in recent memory, coupled with many of the original movie's cast returning, The Accountant 2 is not only exciting, but it finally breaks a long-running trend in his filmography.

Is The Accountant Worth Watching? Breaking Down The Ben Affleck Movie's Reviews & Rotten Tomatoes Scores

Ben affleck's best recent roles have been as supporting characters, the last duel, air, and tender belt have seen affleck in great supporting roles..

Although Affleck is one of the industry's most recognizable leading men, his more recent body of work has seen the actor take on more roles in a supporting or even cameo capacity . Although Affleck made headlines after being cast as Bruce Wayne/Batman in the DCEU, many of his roles outside his superhero work saw the actor in a far more reduced capacity. The Last Duel , The Tender Bar , Air , and even his more recent work with long-time collaborator Kevin Smith have seen Affleck deliver quality, yet much smaller performances that have only maintained his most recent acting trend.

While The Accountant 2 will see Affleck return, it also runs the risk of possibly repeating his supporting role trend.

While Affleck has demonstrated with his more recent body of work an ability to thrive in a supporting capacity, his performance in The Accountant perfectly demonstrates why he should do more leading work. Affleck's charming demeanor, commanding screen presence, and chemistry with many of his co-stars (most notably with Matt Damon) highlight why his potential leading-man return to The Accountant 2 will be a noteworthy sequel to the underrated 2016 action thriller. However, while The Accountant 2 will see Affleck return, it also runs the risk of possibly repeating his supporting role trend .

Bernthal's Braxton is Christian's brother, and despite Bernthal's limited screentime in The Accountant , he delivered an electrifying performance that reinforced his star status too.

The Accountant 2 Can't Make Ben Affleck A Supporting Character, But Can Change His Role

The accountant 2 can give jon bernthal a bigger role while maintaining affleck's leading role status..

Considering that Affleck's Christian Wolff is the titular protagonist, it would be strange to see him as a supporting character in the sequel. However, that could very well happen considering the excellent performance that co-star Jon Bernthal delivered in the first movie as well. Bernthal's Braxton is Christian's brother, and despite Bernthal's limited screentime in The Accountant , he delivered an electrifying performance that reinforced his star status too. Furthermore, The Accountant 2 is set to focus on Christian and Braxton's relationship , which would give Bernthal even more screentime.

While a greater emphasis on the relationship between Christian and Braxton is an interesting idea that might see Affleck's Christian take a backseat in favor of increasing Bernthal's Braxton's importance, it could still work out. The Accountant 2 could jump around between different points in the siblings' lives, while still giving them both an equal amount of importance to the new story . Furthermore, focusing more on their relationship could give both characters more depth than what was seen in the first movie, which would contribute to one of the ways it could be better than its predecessor.

Affleck's willingness to do a sequel to one of his lesser-known projects highlights Affleck's faith in the project, which bodes well for The Accountant 2 's future.

Why The Accountant 2 Can Be Better Than The First Movie

Affleck doesn't really do sequels, so his willingness to do the accountant 2 hints that he has faith in it..

The Accountant 's $155.2 million box-office gross against a budget of $44 million speaks to the movie's commercial success. Furthermore, The Accountant enjoyed solid reviews from most audiences and critics. However, it wasn't the mega success that Warner Bros. Pictures was likely aiming for. Notable for its strong first half and performances by Affleck, Bernthal, Anna Kendrick, and J.K. Simmons, The Accountant gradually falls into generic action movie territory through its latter half . However, The Accountant 2 's narrative changes could give it more depth than the average action movie affair.

Furthermore, discounting Affleck's work in the DCEU, he doesn't have a reputation for doing sequels, as demonstrated by the majority of roles in his long-running career . Affleck's willingness to do a sequel to one of his lesser-known projects highlights Affleck's faith in the project, which bodes well for The Accountant 2 's future. With a stronger emphasis on the relationship between Christian and Braxton over standard action movie tropes, audiences will be treated to a fairly fresh take on the genre. A bigger role for Bernthal will also be another strong selling point, which only improves The Accountant 2 's viability.

ASUS Zenbook Duo (2024) UX8406 review: Perfecting the dual-screen touch experience with 120Hz OLED

Keeping its aesthetics subtle and classy, asus has refined the zenbook duo to near perfection..

Windows Central Verdict

ASUS quickly has me on board with this new Zenbook Duo, as its upright 'desktop mode' is genuinely beneficial. In a desk environment, the top screen sits perfectly at eye level, and the bottom panel holds a selection of apps suitable for reaching out and touching at any moment. A genuinely all-day battery life supports traditional portable use, and using the ASUS Pen 2.0 stylus opens up clever opportunities for quick presentations at work.

Versatile dual touchscreen modes are actually useful

Strong metallic kickstand keeps vertical mode sturdy

Vibrant 3K OLED screens are fast and responsive to touch

Tremendous 11hr+ battery life in single-screen mode

Windows Studio Effects support doesn't redeem the disappointing webcam

ASUS ScreenXpert has issues with stock Windows 11 screen management

Almost too heavy for a 14-inch laptop

Why you can trust Windows Central Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test .

• Price, availability, and specs
• Design & build quality
• Dual screen modes
• Performance & benchmarks
• Battery and thermals
• Camera & audio
• Competition
• Should you buy?

1 . Price, availability, and specs 2 . Design & build quality 3 . Dual screen modes 4 . Performance benchmarks 5 . Battery and thermals 6 . Competition 7 . Should you buy?

ASUS has a taste for flair, often manufacturing devices with a less-than-subtle degree of extravagance, and its latest Zenbook Duo for 2024 is a slight exception.

Featuring dual 14-inch 3K OLED touchscreens running at 120Hz, this AI-powered 2-in-1 laptop features Intel's latest Core Ultra 9 processor. It promises unparalleled productivity, but then again, which laptop brand wouldn't say the same?

Expanding both screens offers a potential working space of up to 19.8 inches if you can stand the seam between each display, but I'll admit that ASUS charmed me with its clever design choices and marketing. Will it land a spot in our roundup of the best 2-in-1 laptops or suffer one too many missteps? Here's my full review.

This review was made possible with a review unit provided by ASUS. The company did not see the contents of the review before publishing.

Zenbook Duo UX8406: Price, availability, and specs

Price : From $1,499 at ASUS CPU : Intel Core Ultra 9 185H RAM : 32GB LPDDR5X-7467 GPU : Intel Arc (up to 2.35GHz) Storage : 2TB PCIe Gen4x4 SSD OS : Windows 11 Home Camera : FHD IR with Windows Hello Displays : 14-inch 3K (2800x1880) OLED @ 120Hz 0.2ms, 500nits w/ HDR with stylus support Ports : 1x USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, 2x Thunderbolt 4 USB-C w/ PD, 1x HDMI-out 2.1, 1x 3.5mm combo audio Connectivity : Wi-Fi 6E AX211, Bluetooth 5.3, no Ethernet Battery : 75WHrs, 11.5hrs ( benchmarked ) Charger : 65W USB-C, 20V DC, 3.25A Dimensions : 31.35 x 21.79 x 1.46 - 1.99 cm Weight : 3.65 lbs (1.65 kg)

ASUS sells the 2024 revision of its Zenbook Duo (UX8406) in two variants starting at $1,499 at its official storefront and various third-party retailers. The first model, the UX8406MA-PS99T, features the exact specifications of my sample UX8406MA-PS99T unit, which is designed for the United Kingdom and has an appropriate AC adapter.

Featuring CPUs from Intel's all-new Core Ultra range , buyers can choose between a high-end Core Ultra 9 185H, a 16-core, 22-thread processor clocked up to a maximum of 5.1GHz, or a more modest Core Ultra 7 155H with a matching core/thread count but limited to 4.8GHz.

Whichever you choose, you'll have access to Intel's AI Boost Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for handling dedicated AI tasks . Integrated Intel Arc chips handle graphics clocked at 2.25GHz or 2.35GHz to match the Core Ultra 9 185H and Ultra 7 155H, respectively.

Naturally, the main attraction of the Zenbook Duo is the dual-touchscreen setup with a removable, slim keyboard and touchpad. Both 14-inch OLED panels support up to 3K resolutions up to 2800x1880 with 120Hz refresh rates, though FHD (1920 x 1200) OLED alternatives running at 60Hz are an option. Variants with 32GB or 64GB of LPDDR5X memory and between 1TB to 2TB of PCIe Gen4x4 solid-state storage mean the specifications are relatively flexible, with my sample unit offering a mixture that leans toward the high-end.

Recommended configuration

<a href="https://clk.tradedoubler.com/click?p=318038&a=2384906&epi=hawk-custom-tracking&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.asus.com%2Fus%2Flaptops%2Ffor-home%2Fzenbook%2Fasus-zenbook-duo-2024-ux8406%2Fwhere-to-buy%2F" data-link-merchant="clk.tradedoubler.com"" target="_blank"> UX8406MA-PS99T (90NB12U1-M000D0)

Ready-made and most closely matching my sample unit, I don't see any reason to recommend any sacrifices in specifications. Featuring Intel's Core Ultra 9 185H CPU with 32GB of RAM, the only change is a drop from 2TB to 1TB of storage, but it won't cause significant struggles for most users.

• Back to the top ⤴

Zenbook Duo UX8406: Design and build quality

The most striking feature that sets the Zenbook Duo apart from other laptops I've used, at least in its default configuration, is how thick and chunky the bottom half of the chassis is. Of course, this is because of the unique design with its detachable keyboard and trackpad combo sitting atop a secondary 14-inch OLED touchscreen and, those combined, above a fold-out metallic kickstand. It makes for a seriously chunky chassis on the bottom end paired with a skinny top panel, though everything is wrapped in a sleek metallic shell.

Opening the screen beyond ~110 degrees raises the laptop slightly at the rear, helping with airflow and leaving more space for the down-firing speakers to resonate against a desk. The slight incline also helps typing feel a little more comfortable, though the keys initially feel clunky, with a thick membrane underneath. I'll admit this wears off after a while, and I'd grown accustomed to the detachable keyboard while writing most of this review with the Zenbook Duo itself. The touchpad is serviceable, with invisible, physical left and right click buttons, and measures roughly 6.76 inches diagonally.

Once you understand that the detachable keyboard is barely 7mm (0.27 inches) thick and only weighs 312g (0.68 lbs), it becomes clear that ASUS has achieved something special. I can forgive the particularly chunky metal kickstand and weighty construction of the Zenbook Duo, as it's all offset by the phenomenal task of still including a functional physical keyboard and touchpad. Around the outer chassis, it opts for a subtle design of sharp lines and a tiny logo, and I dig it.

Sidewards-facing vent placements couple with a smaller exhaust in the screen hinge, which prevents your legs from blocking the cooling process.

On the downside, there's no physical webcam privacy shutter. It sounds minor to those who wouldn't usually give it a second thought, but I always prefer to see one included on costly laptops. Naturally, Windows Hello needs the camera to use face recognition, but it's not difficult to flick open a shutter each time you boot a laptop. Still, it's not all bad, as the sidewards-facing vent placements couple with a smaller exhaust in the screen hinge, which prevents your legs from blocking the cooling process, something all laptop brands should follow.

Port selection isn't overly extensive, but the I/O is far from the stingy offerings seen on some modern laptops. You get two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports on the left side alongside a USB-A 3.2, which is generally enough for at least an external mouse during travel. Hooking up any of the best Thunderbolt 4 hubs or docking stations will open up avenues for more traditional USB-A ports and other extras if you need them at a desk.

The right side holds only an HDMI 2.1 output for external monitors alongside a combination microphone and headphone jack, which means ASUS skipped on an Ethernet port. It's not a deal breaker like it is on gaming laptops, which thrive on ultra-low latency, as a third-party USB-C adapter can provide wired Internet, and built-in Wi-Fi 6E supports practically every modern wireless networking solution anyway until Wi-Fi 7 becomes more common. Bluetooth 5.3 support also means most wireless mice won't need a USB dongle, and cable-free headphones allow for low-latency listening.

Zenbook Duo UX8406: Dual screen modes

Once I cleared a little desk space, I immediately set the Zenbook Duo into one variant of what ASUS officially names 'dual screen mode.' Technically, the first type uses the lower OLED touchscreen as a virtual touchpad and keyboard. Still, if you're detaching the physical Bluetooth keyboard anyway, you might as well use it unless you want to input some handwriting with an additional ASUS Pen 2.0 stylus, which may or may not be included in the box, depending on your region and retailer.

The Bluetooth keyboard is held in place by magnets and charging connectors, and the entire underside is coated in an ultra-smooth plastic finish to protect the lower screen. There's no danger of it coming detached in an accidental knock, as the magnets are strong almost to the point of excess. It's not a genuine struggle to remove, but it holds on tight for something intended to be regularly detached for convenience. Nevertheless, if you have enough desk space to set the Zenbook Duo up this way, you might fall in love with it as quickly as I did.

I often use traditional laptops with a cheap external kickstand to elevate the display to a comfortable height that matches my eye level. In the long run, this protects the health of my neck since I'm not staring downwards at an uncomfortable angle most of the time. ASUS offers the same solution in the dual-screen mode, at least if you use the top screen to monitor your most focused applications. Along the bottom screen, I store quick notes, messaging apps, or web pages open in Microsoft Edge tabs for reference. Immediately swapping the contents of screens 1 and 2 can be done with the F7 key, too.

Since the built-in kickstand is so incredibly sturdy, it doesn't feel unnerving to set the Zenbook Duo up in dual-screen mode, as I suspected it might. Its 14-inch OLED panels are gorgeous, but would I want to position them in a way that looks unusually precarious in ASUS' ad campaigns? It turns out to be a non-issue, and the hinge connecting both screens holds extra tight, which helps to prevent shakiness. Sure, on a particularly rough train journey or a shaky flight, you'll likely want to push the top screen back against a solid surface, but on a desk, it's perfect.

Setting the Zenbook Duo into a side-by-side 'desktop mode' feels far less intuitive, though it has some implied uses. ASUS claims this layout is "perfect for programmers, researchers, and writers," which should appeal to me, but it doesn't hold a candle to its vertical dual-screen modes. For one, the kickstand doesn't reach the left and right edges of the chassis underside, so unless you bring an external solution, there's far more danger of accidentally toppling the laptop over like a dense newspaper.

Vents are placed on both sides of the laptop to help cycle hot and cool air inside, and one of those will undoubtedly be blocked in this mode, if only partially. Plus, depending on your chosen orientation, you'll lose access to either the collection of USB ports or the HDMI-out and headphone jack when standing the laptop on a desk. You could hold the Zenbook Duo like a magazine in this mode, but you'll need somewhere to store the detached Bluetooth keyboard, which isn't particularly convenient. I own a stand that doesn't block the vents, and while it's a fun experience to have two vertical monitors in this mode, it's nowhere near as functional or practical.

Finally, 'sharing mode' is exactly what it sounds like. The Zenbook Duo can open to 180° and lay flat on a table, essentially geared around intimate presentations among a small group. It won't ever replace the traditional environment of presenting a PowerPoint slideshow with a wall-facing projector, but having both touchscreens available to a few colleagues huddled around and interacting with your content is a great way to get your point across in a hurry. This is where the ASUS Pen 2.0 stylus shines the most, whether casually highlighting documents or handwriting lengthier scripts in the mode most resembling a traditional tablet.

Overall, the dual screen mode is the best way to use this laptop, completely matching ASUS' marketing and Duo namesake. The only real-world downsides relate to minor gripes with ASUS ScreenXpert getting stuck behind the native Windows 11 window-snapping prompt when you're trying to arrange your apps quickly, which can be frustrating. Otherwise, bringing up the on-screen keyboard or handwriting field can be selective with the six-finger prompt, but once it's up, it's a reasonable method to input short amounts of text.

Finally, for an unusual yet beneficial layout that ASUS doesn't explicitly highlight, you can deactivate the bottom screen with a shortcut button along the top row to the right of F12, which takes a couple of seconds for Windows 11 to recognize. It's nothing rapid but sets up what I'd consider a battery-conscious configuration that retains the ergonomic eye-level position with its top screen. You're unlikely to switch this mode on and off in a hurry anyway, so the slight delay in activation is no big deal, and it ends up being one of my favorites.

Zenbook Duo UX8406: Performance and benchmarks

Putting the Zenbook Duo through its paces shows some interesting surprises in CPU-centric tests but overall positive performance results. Geekbench 6 compares the Core Ultra 9 185H against laptops that scored in the same range, which, unsurprisingly, shows a collection of similar chips from Intel across the current and previous generations. It ranks above the Core Ultra 7 155H and 165H, as it should, and sits firmly among a handful of 13th Gen Core i7-13700H laptops like the Surface Studio 2 and even manages to edge ahead slightly of the ASUS Zenbook 14X OLED (UX3404,) which featured a high-end 13th Gen Core i9-13900H.

Cinebench R23, another CPU benchmark, shows the Zenbook Duo keeping up with the Dell XPS 14 (9440) and its Core Ultra 7 165H. Two laptops with higher scores seem concerning at first glance, featuring the same Core Ultra 9 185H and less powerful Ultra 7 155H, but the Alienware m16 R2 and ASUS ROG Zephyrus G16 (2024) are gaming laptops designed to withstand extreme temperatures with the help of an extra-chunky chassis and a priority on airflow. Cinebench 2024 runs on broader hardware, including Arm processors , and should serve as a modern equivalent for comparisons, but the Zenbook Duo results feel like an outlier when it scored so unusually low here.

Crossmark gathers information from each component and awards an overall score for system performance rather than focusing on the CPU. The Zenbook Duo squeezes just below Microsoft's Surface Studio Laptop 2 , featuring the same, closely-scoring Intel 13th Gen Core i7-13700H seen in Geekbench 6 results with 64GB of DDR5 RAM. It's a fantastic place to be, and the Zenbook Duo even edges slightly ahead of the Studio Laptop 2 in a similar PCMark 10 test, which benchmarks modern office application performance.

CrystalDiskMark tests the 2TB Western Digital SN740 PCIe Gen4x4 solid-state hard drive in my sample unit, scoring a 4,516 MB/s read speed and 5,251 MB/s for write speed, placing it higher than previous ASUS Zenbook OLED variants. The onboard Intel Arc mobile graphics are part of the new Core Ultra CPU range, and a stress test in 3DMark's Time Spy benchmark shows it scoring above the formidable AMD Radeon 780M but below the Dell XPS 14 (9440) using the same 8-core iGPU. A slimline dedicated GPU from NVIDIA's RTX 40-Series mobile range would have been a nice luxury but undoubtedly pushes the price much higher.

Perhaps most interesting of all my benchmark results, testing both 14-inch OLED touchscreens on the Zenbook Duo confirmed my initial suspicions that they're not identical. They're incredibly similar but not a perfect match. Thankfully, you get 100% accuracy for the DCI-P3 color gamut on both and between 97-98% for Adobe RGB, but differences in tone response and potential brightness separate the two.

While the top panel's minimum brightness almost completely deactivates the OLED display and drops to 0.2 nits, the bottom panel stops at 4.3 nits. Maximum brightness peaks at 376 nits for the top panel and 373 nits for the bottom. This doesn't necessarily make the top half significantly better, as each features a differing white point.

The OLED screens look fantastic, especially when they dynamically switch to 120Hz on AC power.

Still, it proves that controlling both screens simultaneously with one brightness slider isn't entirely ideal. Of course, fiddling with individual brightness settings for two screens would become tedious, but it explains why it often felt like a slight mismatch when both screens displayed the same content. It's not necessarily a flaw; mass production can trigger irregularities like this. Overall, the OLED screens look fantastic, especially when they dynamically switch to 120Hz on AC power.

Zenbook Duo UX8406: Battery life and thermals

Setting the Zenbook Duo to 80% brightness, close enough to exactly 200 nits, I ran PCMark 10's battery benchmark test, which emulates modern office applications and video calls until the device automatically shuts down. Only the top screen was active, with the detachable keyboard fixed onto the bottom screen and power plans set to 'balanced.' Scoring 11 hours 30 minutes means it comes slightly under the '13+ hours' promise made by ASUS, but it's worth remembering that this benchmark is a nonstop stress test with no idle time.

Anything that survives over 8 hours of constant use, even if it never reaches maximum performance, is respectable. As expected, using both screens reduces the potential lifetime. Still, I would happily travel with it for work, knowing the 65W USB-C AC charger is compact and flexible enough to work with various power sources, and fast charge support gets you enough energy to be mobile again quickly.

Setting the stock Windows 11 power plan to 'best performance' and 'performance mode' in the MyASUS companion app, coupled with running the Zenbook Duo on AC power, maximizes the laptop's potential performance output. With these in mind, I repeated CPU-centric benchmarks like Cinebench to put the components under stress and used the 'desktop mode' configuration with the included kickstand to elevate the chassis. Thankfully, the side-mounted vents encourage air circulation away from your lap if a desk setup isn't available.

Analyzing the temperatures of hot air exhausted directly from the side-mounted and hinge-mounted vents shows nothing higher than 46.6°C (115.8°F) and hot spots above the lower OLED screen hovering around 36.6°C (97.8°F.) Naturally, using the detachable keyboard separately puts you in no danger of feeling discomfort from heat, and attaching it to the chassis still benefits from the OLED panel separating it from direct content with any conductive parts.

Zenbook Duo UX8406: Camera and audio

The internal webcam is unusually slow to activate for Windows Hello logins via face recognition during a clean boot. Waking the laptop from sleep or dismissing the lock screen is as fast as it should be. Still, after turning it on from a complete shutdown, I'm left waiting on a 'getting ready' message for a couple of seconds and often opt to type my PIN instead. It's a shame, and I expected better from a laptop loaded with a high-end Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU, but perhaps this will improve over time with software updates. Image quality is a little disappointing, too, so you'd be better off using your phone as a webcam if you're recording local content.

The Zenbook Duo sounds fantastic for all kinds of audio with Dolby Atmos support.

Thankfully, the audio side is a different story. I've lost count of how many laptops I've tested over the years, and the speakers are rarely outstanding unless they're significantly oversized models with enough space to fit a set of decent tweeters and a compact subwoofer. Since ASUS partnered with Harmon/Kardon, the experience should be better than the half-baked disappointments in most commercial units. That's proven true in my testing, as the Zenbook Duo sounds fantastic for all kinds of audio, with Dolby Atmos support baked into a dynamic setting that automatically adjusts based on your content.

Zenbook Duo UX8406: The competition

Quick links

• Lenovo Yoga Book 9i | from $1,999.99 at Best Buy
• HP Spectre Fold | $4,999.99 at Best Buy

It was Lenovo that sold me on 2-in-1 laptops in the first place, so it feels natural to compare this Zenbook Duo to the Yoga Book 9i . It's smaller overall, at 13.3 inches rather than ASUS' 14, but with a pair of 2.8K OLED touchscreens and almost identical modes, it's a natural competitor. The primary downside for Lenovo is its choice of previous-gen Intel Core i7-1355U processor, which means Intel Iris Xe technology for onboard graphics rather than the modern upgrade to Intel Arc. Plus, while it seems functionally comparable, it doesn't look half as sleek when folded and requires you to carry the detachable keyboard and its other accessories separately.

Looking to HP instead with its Spectre Fold grants you a gigantic boost to a 17-inch screen if you detach the included keyboard and stand it on its own. It still folds away into a traditional laptop mode with the keyboard attached, like the Zenbook Duo, though you'll drop to a 12.3-inch form if you use it this way. HP sticks with Intel's 12th Gen Core i7-1250U, but this doesn't stop the cost from rising far above what ASUS can provide with the Zenbook Duo. You're compromising overall convenience, and the Spectre Fold would perform better in the less exciting 'sharing mode' due to its otherwise impressive folding screen technology.

Zenbook Duo UX8406: Should you buy it?

You should buy this if ...

✅  You want a versatile laptop

Touchscreens are often a gimmick unless they offer a genuine benefit. The Zenbook Duo pulls off a virtual keyboard, trackpad, and stylus input combination that excels in multiple ways. You'll need the desk space, but it's a joy to use.

✅  You're a traveling professional

ASUS could have left its 'sharing mode' as a side effect of offering two touchscreens. However, adding a stylus makes it viable for collaborating and quickly showing presentations in otherwise unusual work environments. It's more than a simple markup tool.

You should not buy this if ...

❌ You travel light

14-inch laptops are targeted almost exclusively at traveling tech enthusiasts, but the Zenbook Duo has to trade extra weight for its double-screen benefits. It's not extremely heavy, but it'll likely weigh down a carry-on bag to the point of annoyance.

❌ You're a video-centric content creator

While the stellar audio playback and stylus input are valuable for creatives working with images and video, the lackluster webcam won't serve well enough for those interested in travel vlogging alongside content creation without an external camera.

ASUS turned me onto its often-eccentric catalog of high-end hardware by packaging a genuinely useful combination of gorgeous OLED touchscreens into a subtle chassis. The Zenbook Duo is a fantastic laptop that practically never faltered during my testing, leaving only a desire for a better webcam and an Ethernet adapter freebie thrown in the box. It's not perfect, but it's as close as you can get in this price range, and I'd heartily recommend it among the best 2-in-1 laptops we've ever tried.

I know it's impacted me because I have no desire to shut it down or tidy it away. I have more ideas on how best to use this clever screen combination every few minutes, and so far, it's worked brilliantly on almost every occasion. The vertical mode is the least desirable, but I'm expecting inspiration to strike and find a genuine use for it. If it's within your budget, you won't regret picking up this triumphant 2024 revision of the Zenbook Duo.

A powerful dual-screen laptop with an AI-powered Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, innovative software, and clever touchscreen control, perfect for multitasking on the go.

Ben is the channel editor for all things tech-related at Windows Central. That includes PCs, the components inside, and any accessory you can connect to a Windows desktop or Xbox console. Not restricted to one platform, he also has a keen interest in Valve's Steam Deck handheld and the Linux-based operating system inside. Fueling this career with coffee since 2021, you can usually find him behind one screen or another. Find him on Mastodon @[email protected] to ask questions or share opinions.

• naddy69 Or, for $100 you can buy a portable 16" monitor that plugs into a USB-C port for power and video. Instant dual screens on any laptop. Since I run Windows 11 Arm in a VM on this 16" MacBook Pro, I typically have Mac on one screen and Windows on the other. Very useful. Granted, this is not a touchscreen. But since neither Windows (nor Windows apps) nor MacOS (nor Mac apps) are designed for a touch screen, it's not a problem for me. Reply

naddy69 said: Or, for $100 you can buy a portable 16" monitor that plugs into a USB-C port for power and video. Instant dual screens on any laptop. Since I run Windows 11 Arm in a VM on this 16" MacBook Pro, I typically have Mac on one screen and Windows on the other. Very useful. Granted, this is not a touchscreen. But since neither Windows (nor Windows apps) nor MacOS (nor Mac apps) are designed for a touch screen, it's not a problem for me.

• The Werewolf This laptop is SO frustrating. It's very competitive price and feature-wise to the Lenovo i9, but... you can't fold the screens back 360 degrees and even in 180 mode, the two screens aren't level - one sits quite a way back from the other. I know they'd have to have a wider gap between the screens to accomodate the keyboard, but even a wider hinge would have been a better option. Each incarnation of the Duo has gotten better... Maybe with 2025 model will hit the sweet spot. Also, a 13" model would be nice... Reply

GraniteStateColin said: All fair points, but I would say that while it's true Windows apps are not really designed to be used primarily with touch, many common functions like scrolling, zooming, and moving windows work really well with touch. I find I use touch for those and use the touchpad (or mouse if connected) for other more precision-oriented clicking. I don't think about/notice the time to move my hand to the screen for scrolling, it's just much more intuitive. I know it's just a matter of personal preference, but I could never go back to to a non-touch laptop (my current model is an HP Spectre, where my wife and kids use Surface Studio and Surface Pro and Surface Go).

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