BEFORE: All right, on with my life - I'm going to have to come up with a new plan for summer, where employment is concerned, because the movie theater is going to be closed for two months, after the Tribeca Film Festival is over. Of course, they said that LAST year too, and then re-opened after two weeks, and I picked up a bunch of shifts because I hadn't made other plans. Sometimes there's an advantage to procrastinating. I've got a few ideas, I could sign up for temp work, I applied for another venue that screens on various Manhattan rooftops, and then of course there's also partial unemployment. I can also get some free career counseling at NYU because I'm an alumnus, that might be a smart thing to do. We'll see.
Adam Driver carries over again from "Annette".
THE PLOT: King Charles VI declares that knight Jean de Carrouges settle his dispute with his squire by challenging him to a duel.
AFTER: Well, this has been a rather weird mini-chain with Adam Driver, "White Noise" was about a toxic chemical spill in the 1980's that eerily predicted the one in February 2023, but also was probably really an analogy for the pandemic. And yesterday's film was about love gone wrong, but also kind of about crime and cancel culture. Today's film is set back in medieval times, but the topic is also about sexual assault, and so therefore I'm guessing this is also really an analogy for today's times, even though it's set back then, it's meant to be relevant today. Right?
Ugh, but I'm really behind now, I had to take a day off from movies so I could work early Saturday morning, and now I can't seem to catch up. This is my Monday movie, but I started watching it Monday night instead of Sunday, and now I'm posting on Tuesday. Maybe I need to watch an extra movie tonight, or else I'll have to devote extra time on Memorial Day weekend to movies, which is when I'm supposed to be catching up on TV. You know, the writer's strike has been something of a boon, because there are no new late-night talk shows and that gives me some extra time, as my DVR isn't constantly filling up. Umm, my TV DVR that is, my movie DVR requires constant attention and dubbing films to DVD so I can clear up space.
Anyway, my point is this is a VERY long movie - over two and a half hours, and the reason it's so long is that it shows the same events three times, from three different points of view. Umm, you do know you can shorten the film by just NOT doing that, right? I know, I know, "Rashomon" is a classic film that I've never seen, and directors can't resist using this format to tell stories, but not everybody knows how to do it right. In this film, each time the events run through, we learn a little bit more, so I'm guessing that's the right way to do it, because who wants to see the exact same events three times in a row?
The first time, the events focus on Jean de Carrouges, as he comes back from war, gets married, gets some land, goes to war again, comes back, argues with Count Pierre d'Alencon and the squire Jacques Le Gris, goes to war AGAIN, comes back, only to find that his wife says she was raped by Le Gris in his absence. Notice, if you will, that there's kind of a step missing before "gets married", normally you might expect to see "falls in love" in there, but remember, this was a different time, which is kind of the point. People married for money and/or land back then, love was a secondary concern, if people found love, great, but land and money were really important back then, and remember, wives were considered property because men somehow made the whole system up. This will be important later.
Anyway, Jean flips out after hearing his wife's story, and goes so crazy that he invents the lawsuit. People didn't quite understand what he was going for, and since the local courts were controlled by the Count, the verdict went in Le Gris' favor, because that's fair, and therefore there was no rape. But then Sir Jean challenged the squire to a duel, a trial by combat, because that was still legal, not done very often but nobody had removed it from the legal options, so a duel it was, better polish your armor and get ready...
But first, the film snaps back to the beginning battle again, and this time the events play out from Le Gris' P.O.V. We learn that Le Gris genuinely wants to be Sir Jean's friend, but he also works for the Count, settling his accounting and affairs, collecting the rent from the peasants, that sort of thing. But the Count hates Sir Jean (casting longtime friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as adversaries is no doubt some kind of in-joke here) and so Le Gris is caught in-between. Le Gris visits the castle of Sir Jean, and is struck with desire for Jean's wife, Marguerite. Sir Jean actually suggests that his wife give Le Gris a welcoming kiss - what could POSSIBLY go wrong?
This is where we start to see the other side of this story, Sir Jean is always off crusading somewhere, so Le Gris comes to visit while he's away, and on the servants' day off, he tricks Marguerite to let him in the castle, chases her around, one thing leads to another, and you can probably guess they end up doing it. But is it rape? Well, yes. But also, kind of no, because she does seem to enjoy it, and it turns out that Le Gris knows a few things about some things that Sir Jean has been, well, neglecting. More on that later, but it's a slippery slope here to depict something that is clearly a rape, but also not? Oh, if only we could see these events AGAIN, but from Marguerite's point of view...
Wow, I mean, ask and ye shall receive, right? Just after the lawsuit gets filed (again) and the duel is about to start (again) that old flexible timestream snaps back, and we're back at the start of things, when Sir Jean comes to see Marguerite's father and negotiates the marriage. Jean gets promised a fair bit of land as the dowry, but then, as we know from before, the best bit of land ends up going to the Count, because Marguerite's father is behind on the rent, or tribute or whatever he owed in taxes. And then the Count gave that bit of land to Le Gris, probably because he knew that would really piss off Sir Jean. AND he was right, of course.
But this time through, we learn a bit more about the marriage, from Marguerite's P.O.V. One key thing to consider is that Sir Jean was always off at war, another thing is that he was a very bad lover, never thinking of her needs or desires. And people back then believed, erroneously of course, that a woman could NOT become pregnant unless she had an orgasm. In the present day, of course we know that's not true - I think maybe back then people didn't even believe that women COULD have orgasms, but what do I know? You'd imagine that sort of thing was forbidden by law or religion or both, right? I mean, the patriarchy made the rules and a woman who cheated was an adulteress, but a man who cheated was just a man.
Oh, and also Sir Jean didn't know squat about farming, animal husbandry, accounting, or really, how to deal with anybody in a positive way. So there's that - so when Le Gris comes into Marguerite's life, really, he's everything that her husband isn't. He's charming, witty, intelligent, and also a giving lover, in addition to being a rapist. Yeah, again, this is where things get to be a little dicey and dangerous, from a storytelling point of view. If Marguerite enjoyed the encounter and wanted to see him again and again, then what's really going on here, was it rape or a long-term affair? Did it start as one thing and turn into another? Did she not really understand her own feelings about the whole thing? Why see Le Gris several times and then cry "rape" when her husband came back into town?
This is dangerous because this storyline only really works in medieval times, when women were treated a certain way, were essentially second-class citizens, received no formal sex education and what they were told by "doctors" was mostly incorrect. Also, there were no therapists or psychiatrists or even advice columns to help women understand their feelings - sure, they could talk to each other, but their girlfriends probably all had the same misinformation being given to them. Now, when you try to understand this story through a modern set of perspective, it seems to imply that women can't tell the difference between rape and an affair, if we take the small personal instance and cast it wide. Or it implies that a woman would SAY that she was raped in order to cover up an affair, and that's also very damaging, to imply that women making accusations are lying. No, no, no, that's not the type of story we're supposed to be telling!
To make matters worse, Sir Jean comes back from the war and when he learns from his wife that she's been raped, he demands that they have sex immediately so that her rapist will not be the last man to have sex with her. Wow, that's really terrible and insensitive for so many reasons - again, it was a different time, but do we have to highlight such bad behavior, all around?
Finally there's the rape trial, and that kind of hammers home the message that this meant to be like a very long episode of "Law & Order: Medieval Intent". Since's it a clear case of "he said-he said" (remember, it doesn't really matter what SHE said, because it's 1389) the king rules that the duel will settle the matter. Clearly God will determine the outcome of the duel based on who is more gooder and is telling the truth. Umm, right. And if Sir Jean loses, that means his wife was lying, therefore committing perjury, and she'll be burned at the stake, so there's that, too. Jeez, after that it's hard to determine which is more brutal, the trial or the duel. Yeah, it's probably the duel.
I remember seeing posters for this JUST as I was leaving the AMC to go work elsewhere - this got released in theaters in October 21, a time when most people still weren't going to movie theaters regularly, so it only had a 45-day window before it was available on streaming. When you factor in the running time of over two and a half hours, which meant that theaters couldn't play it as many times per day, really, there's just no way this film could have been profitable. Instead it only earned $30 million in theaters against a $100 million budget. That's a bomb no matter how you slice it, and the dicey subject matter probably didn't help. Nicole Holofcener, the director of "Lovely & Amazing" and "The Land of Steady Habits" was brought in to help with the screenplay, but this is still a #FeministFail. I felt like I needed a shower after watching this.
Also starring Matt Damon (last seen in "No Sudden Move"), Jodie Comer (last seen in "Free Guy"), Ben Affleck (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Harriet Walter (last seen in "My Dinner with Hervé"), Alex Lawther (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Marton Csokas (last seen in "Kingdom of Heaven"), Oliver Cotton (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Nathaniel Parker (last seen in "The Haunted Mansion"), Tallulah Haddon, Bryony Hannah (last seen in "Jupiter Ascending"), Ian Pirie (last seen in "The Matrix Resurrections"), Michael McElhatton (last seen in "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword"), Sam Hazeldine (last seen in "The Hitman's Bodyguard"), Clive Russell (last seen in "Their Finest"), Julian Firth (last seen in "Burnt"), Zoé Bruneau, Adam Nagaitis (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Caoimhe O'Malley, John Kavanagh (last seen in "In Secret"), Zeljko Ivanek (last seen in "The Courier"), Simone Collins, Clare Dunne (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"), Christian Erickson (last seen in "Le Divorce"), Gin Minelli, Serena Kennedy, Bosco Hogan (last seen in "The Professor and the Madman"), Brian F. Mulvey.
RATING: 5 out of 10 broken lances
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