Jodie Comer on The Last Duel’s Feminist Subtext and Her Venice Film Festival Debut
On Friday night, Jodie Comer’s latest film, The Last Duel, premiered at the Venice Film Festival—and its reputation preceded it. Directed by veteran filmmaker Sir Ridley Scott and costarring Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Adam Driver, it marks Affleck and Damon’s first reunion as screenwriting collaborators since 1997’s Good Will Hunting earned them the Academy Award for best original screenplay. While the most feverish chatter at the premiere might have surrounded another infamous reunion—namely Bennifer, who took to the red carpet for the first time since getting back together earlier this year—rest assured that as the lights went up in the Sala Grande following the screening, there was only one thing the audience was talking about: Comer’s extraordinary performance.
The Last Duel tells the story of the last legally sanctioned duel in French history, between the knight Jean de Carrouges (Damon) and the squire Jacques Le Gris (Driver), who were once close friends but became bitter enemies after the latter raped the former’s wife, Marguerite (Comer), and denied it. The film cleverly illustrates the story through a Rashomon-style trio of perspectives culminating with Marguerite’s, which offers a rare and richly crafted insight into the interior world of an oppressed but formidable medieval woman. “What was really exciting to me was the opportunity to give this woman a voice,” says Comer the day after the premiere. “It’s crazy that there was so much written about this story but yet very little information about the woman at the heart of it.”
In order to shed new light on Marguerite, Damon and Affleck brought on board a third screenwriter, respected indie filmmaker Nicole Holofcener, to lend the film’s final third a more authentic women’s perspective. “It was great to be able to work with Matt and Ben, but also very closely with Nicole, and really try and delve into the history that she lived through to try and create this woman and imagine what she was like,” Comer adds. “We knew that she was remarkable because when you look back at that time in history and see what women were up against within the patriarchy, women were essentially property at that time. She had so much to lose by speaking out, and yet she did anyway. That sense of resilience and sense of justice were so admirable.”
In one of the film’s pivotal scenes, Marguerite sits before an all-male jury to testify about the assault, and their probing questions feeling unnervingly similar to the myths around rape culture that still exist to this day. (As just one example, she offhandedly remarked to a friend in the months prior that her attacker was physically attractive, a comment the friend then shared with the jury as proof that Marguerite had, somehow, enjoyed it.) “The saddest part is that you can go back to any decade in history and it will always be relevant,” says Comer. “Still today, in a lot of places, women don’t have full autonomy over their own bodies and women are still property. So I felt a kind of duty of care in making sure it was a truthful telling of the story.” As Comer describes it, Marguerite’s tenacity and resilience stayed with her long after the film wrapped at the end of last year. “She found that strength within herself, and she did things her own way, and I actually ended up feeling very personally empowered through Marguerite,” she says.
