When the trailer for Ridley Scott’s Napoleon was released last summer, French social networks shuddered with excitement. The trailer’s promises were bountiful, and the historical inaccuracies spotted here and there (no, Napoleon didn’t fire cannon at the Pyramids) did little to dent our enthusiasm; great artists are allowed some poetic licence, after all. How daring of the 85-year-old English film-maker to tackle such a momentous subject – we were in awe already. Would his Napoleon measure up to his masterful debut, The Duellists, set in France during the Napoleonic wars and adapted from a short story by Joseph Conrad? Hopes were running high.
That it was an Englishman charged with this latest blockbuster interpretation of Napoleon’s influence only fuelled the anticipation. Most of us welcome a foreign take on our history and cultural heritage, perhaps even more when it comes from a former best enemy. This cross-cultural experience fosters fascinating exchanges and conversations. How many musketeer, Sun King and Marie Antoinette stories has Hollywood churned out since the birth of cinema? We have lost count. How many Joan of Arcs? There was Ingrid Bergman, Hedy Lamarr, Jean Seberg, Milla Jovovich, not to mention the unforgettable Renée Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece.
Hollywood is not alone, of course. Many film-makers have had a go at interpreting some facet of French history. The great Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s take on the revolutionary Danton with Gérard Depardieu in the title role is a gem of visual elegance and rigorous intelligence. As for Egyptian master Youssef Chahine’s Adieu Bonaparte, about Napoleon’s 1798 campaign in Egypt, it certainly doesn’t lack beauty or majesty. Foreigners often perceive things we cannot see, helping us to understand ourselves better. That is, of course, when they have successfully pierced our secrets and unveiled them with skill. There are also epic failures in the genre: the films whose scripts have no sense of history, no intelligence or understanding of historical characters, no point of view. Those are the works of film-makers who use French history the way others use wallpaper, as decor, and as mere anecdote.
I went to one of the first screenings of Scott’s Napoleon in an arthouse cinema in Paris’s Left Bank, not far from the Sorbonne. I assumed they would screen the film in their 250-seat panoramic theatre. Instead, they were timidly showing it on their smallest screen. Perhaps they were just testing the waters – it was only 10am. I did not expect, however, to find myself all alone. And fortunately so. For the next 158 minutes, I was able to huff and puff aloud without disturbing anyone else.
Ridley Scott meeting his Waterloo on the screen is not a pretty sight. His Napoleon inspires in the French viewer a festival of emotions in quick succession: sadness to witness such a colossal missed opportunity; excruciating pain to hear such inept dialogue; bewilderment upon realising that Scott doesn’t seem to have bothered to pick up one history book to check, well, historical facts; sleepiness right into the umpteenth battle scene; boredom listening to the chronological crash course of a script, which is so dire it lacks any semblance of a storyline; and gratitude when Napoleon blows out the candles, kindly sparing us another romp with Josephine.
How could so many talents behind and in front of the camera, such a rich subject and so many means lead to such debacle? Perhaps because Scott is more interested in images than words. But beautiful costumes and makeup, and even a talented director of photography, don’t make a film great. You need an eye and vision behind the camera, a conductor, or what we call in France an auteur. Stanley Kubrick had a special room in his home dedicated to his research on Napoleon, a film that he pursued all his life like an unattainable goal, so complex is the title figure, so perfectionist was Kubrick.
The late film director would have got his facts right: for instance, that Napoleon never planned to invade the whole of Russia in a three-week campaign and that he was well aware of the dreadful Russian winter; he had just not anticipated an outbreak of typhus that killed 100,000 of his men.
This wouldn’t be so much of a problem had he displayed an original perspective on his subject, let alone any understanding of his personality and achievements. He even seems ignorant of the fact that there are two men in Napoleon: there is Bonaparte, a hero of the French Revolution who gave France and Europe institutions of the Enlightenment era that still exist today, and who liberated Jewish communities from their European ghettos; and there is Napoleon, the hero turned weary authoritarian ruler, whose military campaigns drained a whole nation of its youth and wealth. Beyond facts, Scott’s great historical deficiency is to ignore the politics; instead giving us Napoleon’s tactics on the battlefield as a mirror to his sex life. It’s inept, crass and boring.
Considering the roughly $200m that was spent on the adaptation, he could have easily made a two-part film, acknowledging some of the topic’s complexity. Instead, he cast a worn-out and rotund-looking 49-year-old,
Joaquin Phoenix, to play a 24-year-old dashing young officer, and gave the great actor only two moods to play: brutal and grotesque. Vanessa Kirby as Josephine is the only redeeming feature in this industrial disaster of a film: she is plausible and lovable, despite the banal lines the script gives her. Alas, Josephine alone cannot save this Napoleon. Let’s just hope that Scott’s failure will soon be another film director’s triumph. Next!
Agnès Poirier is a political commentator, writer and critic
