"Belfast" and "The Last Duel"

I really wish that "Belfast" worked for me.  I like that Kenneth Branagh is making something so personal and so sweet.  I like all the actors involved.  I'm not remotely surprised that some people adore this film.  However, I seem to be completely immune to its charms.  "Belfast" is about a working class family in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, who undergo some difficult times.  We see events unfold through the eyes of nine year-old Buddy (Jude Hill), who lives with his older brother Will (Lewis McAskie), his no-nonsense Ma (Catriona Balfe), and his loving Granny (Judi Dench) and Pop (Ciaran Hinds).  Buddy's Pa (Jamie Dornan) is frequently away for work in England, and isn't home when a Protestant riot breaks out.  Suddenly Buddy's once idyllic neighborhood is full of uncomfortable tensions, and his parents are fighting over the family's future.

Branagh's approach to the potentially difficult material is to couch it in nostalgia.  Buddy may be poor, but he's a happy, lively kid who has good relationships with his parents and grandparents, and has a healthy mischievous streak.  While his parents are debating moving to England, Buddy is more concerned with the pretty girl in his class, and getting roped into petty theft by one of the older neighborhood kids.  He sees the world in literal black and white, with the exception of movies.  The Troubles and all the difficult questions they bring stay mostly in the background, aside from an explosive final confrontation between the adults.  Buddy's attempts to grapple with these issues are fleeting, often played for laughs due to his misconceptions, or only seen through the filter of his childish worldview.  The tone of the film is kept very child-friendly, and it's designed to be an audience pleaser.

This makes for a very charming movie, but I couldn't get over how idealized and sanitized Branagh made his childhood.  Buddy lives in a version of Belfast that feels like it came out of a storybook, and Dornan and Balfe are unreasonably good looking for being working class Irish parents in the 1960s.  Even the local criminal figure, Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan), is oddly good looking.  I'd compare it to something out of a Hollywood film of the same era, but at least Hollywood was sensible enough to cast character actors with interesting faces in their melodramas.  And frankly, there's not much of a story to "Belfast."  It never feels like Buddy's family is facing any real danger or real strife.  There's a subplot with the grandparents that might have managed to tug the heartstrings if it had devoted more time to them.  But it didn't.

Now on to "The Last Duel," which I fully intended to pair up with Ridley Scott's other 2021 movie, "House of Gucci," but that review needed more than three paragraphs to adequately work out my feelings towards.  My thoughts on "The Last Duel" are more straightforward.  It's a very good film, but one I'm probably never going to watch again because I found the experience unpleasant - in a good way.  Three characters in 1300s France, the squire Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), his rival Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), and his wife Lady Marguerite (Jodie Comer), each recount the events that lead up to a duel between Jean and Jacques.  Marguerite claims she was raped by Jacques.  Jacques believes the encounter was consensual. The script was split up between three writers - Nicole Holofcener, who wrote Marguerite's POV, and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who wrote Jean and Jacques.'  Affleck also appears in the film as Count Pierre d'Alencon, the hedonist nobleman that Jean and Jacques have both sworn fealty to.

   

"The Last Duel" is refreshing in the way that it reframes the usual medieval tale of valor and chivalry from a feminist perspective.  Jean and Jacques' narratives present squabbles over land and position, and their attitudes toward Marguerite appear benevolent, if misguided.  Then we get to Marguerite's version of events, revealing that both of them are cruel and selfish in their own ways, and being a woman in the 1300s in this kind of situation was utterly nightmarish.  The film keeps getting more unpleasant and intense, with the actual stakes of the duel not fully revealed until near the climax.  There's so much riding on the outcome by the end, that the duel itself is one of the most thrilling fight scenes I've seen in years.  However, the preceding two hours of screen time that it takes to get there are absolutely exhausting to get through.  The emotional and physical violence, the culminating dread, and the sheer brutality of medieval society is unrelenting.

Thanks to Ridley Scott it all looks great.  The duel is wonderfully visceral and the actors really sell the damage that the two men deal to each other.  There's great attention paid to historical detail, as the film was based on true events that are fairly well documented.  However, none of the American and British actors attempt a French accent, thankfully.  The performances are good, and in the case of Jodie Comer very good, and it's a shame that the film was such a dud at the box office, taking it out of awards contention.  As Ridley Scott epics go, this is one of his better ones because it's themes and characters are so strong.  Those looking for simple action adventure fare, however, are advised to look elsewhere.     

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