Napoleon is not real
Such a film - bloody and colorful, with a computer-generated Moscow, with the severed head of Marie Antoinette and with cannonballs tearing off arms and legs, piercing ice and horse skins - could well be expected from younger directors.
From Ridley Scott, at 87 years old, after the polished “The Duelists”, “Gladiator” and “Hannibal”, to be honest, I wanted something different. It’s completely different, especially since even before the brilliant Scott with all his Oscars, we managed to see a lot of very good and simply brilliant films about Napoleon and with Napoleon.
And it's not even about thirst historical truth - unfortunately, there is a minimum of it in the almost three-hour film. To be honest, I wanted a beautiful picture, memories on the topic, and my own view. From the recognized great, I won’t argue with this, Ridley Scott.
Instead, it’s a chaotic collection of cliches, most of them funny, but that’s it. Linked together somehow at random in an attempt to create at least the appearance of a consistent narrative about the man who rewrote history. Which in the film is nothing more than a kind of provincial macho.
It is, of course, difficult to cram the biography of the restless Corsican into 158 minutes, but the jumps through history, especially military history, are frankly depressing. So much so that you are not surprised at how Napoleon time after time, including at Waterloo, rushes into the attack with a saber in his hands, like a simple hussar or dragoon.
Next to the emperor there is a kind of on-duty set of relatives and associates - and the first among them is the mother, bulky as a rock, instead of the tiny, strong-willed Corsican noblewoman, who in reality did not even deign to appear at her son’s coronation. Also here are only Josephine’s children, brother Lucien, deputy of the Convention and Council of 500, Barras, who flashed a couple of times, and Talleyrand with Caulaincourt.
And not a single marshal, Ney at Waterloo - without a name, and occasionally a fat man in glasses with a hint of Davout looms next to the emperor. Instead of the faithful Mamluk Rustam - some unidentified black man, sorry - African American. One might think that all these are minor details, but the spirit of the era, no matter how you look at it, is not felt in the film.
And there’s something wrong with the atmosphere, although the revolutionary years are skillfully diluted with a couple of songs from that era, and the legendary “Ah, sa-ira!” It even sounds very appropriate. And representatives of the French high society, who for some reason constantly eat from their hands and drink like cab drivers, look simply plebeians.
Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the role of Napoleon, let's face it, is the same macho man who looks a lot like a bandit, not overweight, but fat and somewhat rumpled. This can still be accepted in the last years of the hero’s life, but in the younger years – Ridley Scott had to do something about it.
Napoleon knew how to be not just charming and even graceful, with such convincing charisma that in just five years the nation accepted him as emperor - the owner of the new French throne. And the “Empire” style is undoubtedly impeccable; without the real Napoleon it would not have become so.
It’s hard to believe that the social beauty Josephine Beauharnais could fall in love with someone like H. Phoenix. She learned well from the slightly rustic Vanessa Kirby, because a Creole woman could not be a socialite. Even the sight of a tattered cat, almost a prostitute, who had just suffered a terrible illness, I admit, did not blur the overall picture.
She would have been able to make Napoleon fall in love with her. And somehow it’s even touching that Napoleon sails from Egypt to France, judging by the film, only because his wife cheated on him. And not at all to take power into their own hands.
And much later, returning to France again, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon hurries not to the empty French throne, but to Josephine, whom for some reason the Russian Emperor Alexander decided to visit. Josephine died before the French emperor could come to her.
But another flight of the emperor to Paris - from Russia, when it was necessary to deal with the conspiracy of General Male, is not noted in the film. This is a trifle, an insignificant episode. And in general, too many episodes, as important as anything else, have been omitted. But there are plenty of cannonballs tearing flesh.
Perhaps it would be nice to make the love story of Napoleon and Josephine the core of the entire film. But it didn’t work here either - the film gives us a set of rather vulgar scenes interspersed with mutual confessions, sometimes pompous, sometimes downright stupid.
And in general, in terms of the film, almost the only acting success was the work of Paul Rhys, who played Talleyrand. However, he failed to even hint at the complexity of the nature of this professional traitor. Or they simply didn’t give it.
However, another actor looks great - Ian McNeice, who is perfectly made up and plays Louis XVIII, but he only has two episodes in the film. One of them will probably not be forgotten is the scene when the king, after the news of Napoleon’s landing in Fréjus, continues his meal as if nothing had happened, but for some reason standing, which, you see, is nonsense.
In fact, 2023, despite all the problems with distribution, turned out to be, one might say, successful in terms of historical cinema. Let us only recall “Nuremberg”, which makes you remember almost everything, although slightly diluted with an untrustworthy love line, the impressive but slightly boring “Oppenheimer”, almost flawless in terms of facts, as well as the cosmic “Challenge”, criticized but accepted by the audience .
The heavy and, of course, insanely expensive “Napoleon”, by all indications, will not be noted in this series. They may give him Oscars, but this won’t surprise anyone these days. Even if the film pays for itself with interest, it will be considered a masterpiece only by those who have long been programmed for modern “action”.
However, the unassuming public will most likely be satisfied. For her, the next movie Napoleon will definitely be her own - rude, impudent, but, alas, besides that - simply vulgar.
Someone will probably respond by saying that this Corsican parvenu may have been just that. And the time, they say, was like that - rough, merciless, not like the present, although it seems to be much worse.
But then what about Tsvetaev’s “charming dandies” and the devoted wives of the Russian Decembrists? These Russian heroes grew out of the Patriotic War, from the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig and the march on Paris. For many of them who fought against Napoleon, he was at first an idol - like for Andrei Bolkonsky.
But the picky viewer is unable to believe that they themselves were the same as Ridley Scott’s emperor. And even if such a Napoleon is madly in love - with Josephine, and not with undivided power, this does not change the essence of the matter.
Ridley Scott has the wrong Napoleon, and nothing can be done about it. All that remains is to name “those” Bonapartes – the real ones, and above all those of Sergei Fedorovich Bondarchuk. And in “War and Peace,” even if only in episodes performed by Vsevolod Strzhelchik, and in “Waterloo,” where Rod Steiger is simply incomparable in the role of the aging emperor.
In the Hollywood version of War and Peace, Napoleon played by Herbert Lom, who always shone in The Pink Panther, is almost invisible. It would be hard to expect anything different against the backdrop of Audrey Hepburn - Natasha Rostova and Henry Fonda in the role of Pierre Bezukhov. But the emperor in exile by Roland Blanche in Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s half-forgotten film “Prisoner of Europe” was extremely convincing.
Who did not convince at all was the talented comedian, and also director Christian Clavier in the six-episode French chronicle. He never managed to shed the clown mask from Asterix and Obelix, Aliens and Between an Angel and a Demon. It’s no coincidence that the television series ended and ended.
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