There are very good things in it Napoleon by Ridley Scott for lovers of the character and his story, and others that leave you a little dissatisfied, dissatisfied and even disgusted. Here is a brief selection of pros and cons of a film that, regardless of its cinematographic values, offers a great spectacle and invites debate.
The best:
—Josephine. The composition of the character provided by actress Vanessa Kirby is excellent. Very attractive with look with short hair (an ideal style for the guillotine, from which, we are told, she only escaped because she was pregnant), she is suitably seductive and immodest in her first appearances, despite the fact that the real Josefina tried to smile little so that she would not His teeth were broken and black because of the much sugar cane he had consumed in Martinique. The film describes her relationship with Napoleon very well. She is a survivalist at the beginning (she is still a widowed and mature former aristocrat looking for a protector in a troubled world), with a point of fascination for myth on the rise, she is the first to see the intimate miseries of the character . The annoyed face in some sex scenes says it all. Her progression towards hedonism, lovers and waste, her fall due to her inability to produce an imperial heir and her fragile charm from then on, becoming a confidant friend at Malmaison, are very well told, curiously, in a film that puts the accelerator early and skips so many things. It is true that the relationship began when Josephine’s son went to Napoleon to ask for his father’s saber to be guillotined from him.
—Highlight the role of the hussar Hippolyte Charles, Josefina’s lover, who was a asset (and his elegance is worth the word). It would seem questionable to give him so much space with the limitations of yardage and so many important marshals that he is left in the dark. But the hussar played a fundamental role in Napoleon’s fixation on Josephine, unleashing his jealousy and causing him some very serious problems (and not just to put on his hat): involved in a network of fraudulent contracts with the Army, he dragged Josephine along, who always needed money, to a very dangerous game with public funds that affected Bonaparte’s honesty. The handsome and elegant Hippolyte also serves Ridley Scott to capture his fascination with uniforms – he wears one very similar to that of the hussar D’Hubert (Keith Carradine) in The duelists, which seems like a self-tribute.
—Show the way Napoleon practiced sex. The privateer, apparently, was really like that in private. You can see it in his letters. I’ll catch you right here, here I’ll kill you. Little given to prolegomena and everything at a dizzying pace. Impatient in love as in war. Gunner at last. One of his lovers, the singer Giusseppina Grassini (!) Summarized: “The matter was over in three minutes.” She was also like that at the table: “If you want to have a good dinner, have dinner with Cambacérès, if you want to have a bad dinner, have dinner with Lebrun, if you want to have a quick dinner, have dinner with me,” she said. Oh, and, interestingly, she didn’t like cognac.
—It’s partly a license from the movie, because his mother (Madame Mere, Doña Letizia) did not intervene in the matter by putting her naked in bed, but it is true that Napoleon had an affair with the 17-year-old waitress Élénore Denuelle de la Plaigne and left her pregnant, eager to prove that he was not impotent and that infertility of their marriage was Josefina’s fault. The girl gave birth to an illegitimate son, Count Léon (from the last letters of her father’s name) and opened up to the emperor’s idea of divorcing her to have an heir.
—The emphasis on cannons. Ridley Scott has seen very well how essential they were in Napoleon’s career. The pieces of his Great Battery were “his spoiled daughters.” He has rarely been seen in the cinema (not even in The cannons of Navarone) an artillery boom like in the film (and the effects of cannonballs), which gives the viewer a very real feeling of being on a Napoleonic battlefield. The Napoleonic battles, as is very well shown, were true carnage: it is estimated that the sum of casualties at Borodino (the bloodiest confrontation until the Battle of the Marne a century later) would be equivalent to an entire passenger plane crashed in an area of 15 square kilometers every 15 minutes during the 10 hours that the battle lasted (Napoleon, a lifeby Andrew Roberts, Word Editions, 2016)
-The atmosphere. The director wraps his film in magnificent textures and very painterly colors, demonstrating that he has been inspired by the paintings of the time. For Egypt, the influence of Gérôme is evident (and let us remember that his Pollice verse was the trigger for Gladiator). In Austerlitz and Russia, Gros; at the coronation, David, of course.
—The soundtrack. Along with the original music of Martin Phipps, Corsican choirs, popular songs of the time, such as Carmagnole, and classical pieces, especially Haydn. Also Purcell. All very à la Kubrick.
—The Duke of Wellington. The British general, shown to be very old (Rupert Everet is 64 years old, Wellesley was 46 in Waterloo), seems to act as Ridley Scott’s alter ego with his skeptical, biting and ironic vision of Napoleon. He also represents the most widespread British opinion about the Corsican “tyrant” and “upstart.” The scene (invented, Napoleon and Wellington never met) in which they talk on board the HMS Bellerophon where the emperor is held captive before being taken into the HMS Northumberland to Saint Helena, serves to show that, unlike the young midshipmen who appear, the establishment British did not succumb to Napoleon’s charisma and always saw the seams (like Ridley Scott).
—Tsar Alexander. The film correctly shows Alexander’s character, his admiration for Napoleon and the way Napoleon took him to the orchard at Tilsit. It is true that Alejandro visited Josefina and that there was chemistry between them.
—Among other small good details, that of the British sergeant who very pertinently lines up the infantry with a horizontal stick during the battle of Waterloo. He looks like Pat Harper himself, Sharpe’s comrade in Bernard Cornwell’s novels. The Weimar Republic-style atmosphere that reigns in Paris after the fall of Robespierre is very good. And the slaughter and impaling of cuirassiers in the Russian forest by the Cossacks, portrayed as if they were the Marcomanni of Gladiator.
Worst:
—The speed with which Napoleon’s life flashes across the screen (if today is Friday this is Jena). It is true that he was compared to a shining star and that one of his main virtues in war was speed (not to mention what was already mentioned about sex), but there are really too many leaps and many fundamental things are given up. The intellectual part of it, for example.
—The absolute absence of the war in Spain. It is not acceptable, even if it is made by a British person, for a film about Napoleon to dispense with the decisive peninsular setting. We have been left (waiting for what the original four-hour version on Apple TV+ may bring) without seeing Ridley Scott emulate Goya’s palette, and we can only imagine what he would have done with the famous charge of the Polish lancers in Somosierra (“the emperor is watching us!”).
—The hieraticism of Joaquin Phoenix. Probably impressed by playing such a character, who has had such outstanding performances as those of Albert Dieudonné (Abel Gance’s wonderful Napoleon), Marlon Brando, Charles Boyer, Rod Steiger or Patrice Chéreau, Phoenix shows few registers and goes through the footage (and the years) with almost the same expression of concentrated transcendence. He moves better in intimate scenes – when he smells Josefina’s letter and passes it over his body, when he fights with her (“you’re empty!”, “and you’re fat!”) or they play (“love is a nonsense of two,” said Bonaparte) – than in the masses. It is worth noting that he offers in some moments an unexpected fragility of Napoleon. The public moment in which he seems most Comfortable, and the joke is worth it, is when at the enthronement he wears a laurel wreath like a Roman emperor. He retains his recurring gesture of covering his ears when his cannons fire and the historically accredited gesture of pulling the ear affectionately, both to pages and to veteran grenadiers. grognards.
—Napoleon’s charge at Waterloo. Napoleon did not lead any cavalry charges in the battle. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it on other occasions. And that he was not a brave man: his courage was proven throughout his life, with heroic episodes such as those of Lodi and Arcole (“for the brave, the rifle is nothing more than the handle of the bayonet” , He said). He was lucky because in all the battles he was quite within range (as the movie shows) and many people around him were killed.
—The massacre on the ice of Austerlitz. Ridley Scott has stuck with the myth of the destruction of the Russian and Austrian armies on the frozen lakes. The scene is a great exaggeration (it seems that we are in the battle of Lake Peipus, in 1242, where Alexander Nevsky beat the Teutonic Knights), although it works cinematically (the filmmaker feels like Eisenstein and delights in that scene of the standard bearer sinking in the bloody depths) and it is true that a good part of the Allied casualties occurred in the flight: the Austrian cavalry lacked defense in the rear part of the breastplate and were very vulnerable from behind (like Josephine).
—The shot at the Pyramids. The so-called Battle of the Pyramids actually took place at such a distance from those monuments that it is impossible for a bullet to hit Khafre’s as shown in the film, to the horror of Egyptomaniacs. Ridley Scott has justified it by saying that it was clear that Napoleon was in Egypt. Egyptology has already been thoroughly discussed in Exodus: kings and gods showing the pyramids under construction in the New Kingdom! On the other hand, the scene in which Napoleon puts his ear to the mouth of a mummy is very good and accurate: Bonaparte inaugurated our curiosity about Ancient Egypt, he did not bomb it.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
#worst #Ridley #Scotts #Napoleon