A helmet that makes sense... only in Hollywood.
While the eponymous confrontation is mostly very accurately recreated from the numerous firsthand accounts that survived, some details from The Last Duel stick out.
- Arrows on Fire when Jean fights at the siege of Wark in 1380. It was decidedly not practical to use them outside of naval warfare, though this may be a case of Unreliable Narrator as the scene is presented as if told by him.
- Some of the Scotsmen wear kilts and Jean even has one draped around his shoulders when he returns home. This is a similar mistake to Braveheart, as kilts weren't fully introduced for a few more centuries.
- As far as anyone today knows, respectable women in the high and late Middle Ages never went bareheaded outside their own homes. The film is a bit inconsistent in this regard, as it shows quite a selection of period appropriate hats and veils, but they're missing in some of the social situations where they would be expected, particularly during the trial.
- The "wife as property" mindset wasn't as pronounced at the time as it is in the film (it was more the case in ancient Roman/Greek times), and rape could be punished by death. The real issue was the difficulty of proving the rape occurred, which the film depicts accurately otherwise. Case in point; when Pierre asks Jacques whether he raped Marguerite, he's deadly serious. But, as soon as Jacques says that Marguerite 'submitted' to him (in his mind, at least) Pierre's fully on his side to try and get the charges dismissed.
- Le Gris attempts to court a noblewoman quite seriously during a party, only to be rebuffed thanks to his lecherous reputation; there's a strong suggestion made that he's effectively stuck as being single without a committed relationship. In real life, he was married and had children who could carry on his name following his death.
- In the film, Jacques has Adam Louvel trick Marguerite into opening the door and then kicks Adam out so they can be alone. In Marguerite's real-life accusation, Jacques broke in after Adam delivered a love letter and tried to convince her to open the door. Furthermore, Adam actually stayed to assist Jacques in raping her; holding her down when Jacques demanded his help when she fought against him. Marguerite’s actual accusation, in general, left no room for Jacques’s POV to be confused about what he was doing, and included a pretty clear and vicious Post-Rape Taunt. In response, the real Jacques’s main defense was not that the encounter was consensual, but that he was not and could not have been in the Carrouges' castle during the time in which the rape took place, as he would have had to ride a round trip of fifty miles to the castle and back in one day and in the dead of winter.
- The film leaves out Marguerite's family's support of her and their involvement in the trial, including one of her cousins, Thomin du Bois, who challenged Adam Louvel to a duel as well for his role in the rape. It also avoids mentioning that the court considered her unwavering and powerful accusations, despite the shame and risk she brought on herself by doing so, as significant evidence of her truthfulness in its own right. But that would diminish both the drama and applicability of her situation.
- The trial was a bit more involved than the "he said, she said" that the film suggests, including Le Gris hiring the best lawyer in France (whose notes suggest that he himself believed Le Gris was guilty), analysis of whether or not Le Gris could've reasonably ridden the fifty-mile distance necessary to commit the crime, and one of the witnesses to Le Gris's alibi being arrested in Paris and also charged with rape, damaging his testimony.
- The real Jacques Le Gris was knighted before the duel to ensure both combatants were of equal standing (to avoid the possibility of Jean de Carrouges losing against someone of inferior feudal rank). It doesn't happen in the film. The king does refer to both of them as knights at the beginning of the duel though, so the knighting may have simply happened offscreen.
- The joust helmets with half-visors are pure Rule of Cool, Rule of Perception, and Helmets Are Hardly Heroic. Sure, the idea of a heavy cavalryman’s helmet protecting the left side of the face more than the right was a real thing: helmets from around this time would often have fewer or no breathing holes on the left side to reduce weak points, and later jousting helmets would incorporate reinforcing pieces. But a visor that protects one side of the face and not the other is just silly, which is why such a visor never existed. Just because the left side gets hit more often or at a more perpendicular angle doesn’t mean you never catch a hit on the right, and if your opponent sees that one side of your face is totally unprotected he will naturally aim to hit you there. Visors were lowered especially in response to two things: advancing into an arrow storm, or cavalrymen with lances charging each other. A couched lance to the face is basically the most lethal thing that can happen to you in medieval warfare, and if there were ever a time to fully protect your face, this is it. Matt Damon admitted that, as described in the Eric Jager book, the duel would have looked quite un-cinematic as the two duellists were basically walking tin cans with a small eye slit.
- At the end of the film, a textual epilogue reveals that Jean died a few years after the duel during a Crusade (which very likely happened, in 1396 in Nicopolis, nowadays' Nikopol in Bulgaria), while Marguerite outlived him by thirty years, never remarrying. In reality, Jean lived for another ten years after the duel, so most of his marriage to Marguerite was ahead of him. They also went on to have two more children. It's also unknown how much longer the real-life Marguerite actually lived.
