A superstar over the centuries, the character of Napoleon Bonaparte is a treat for historians, collectors and creators. To each his own emperor, with a retouched, magnified, caricatured profile. Flows of ink, kilometers of television and cinematographic images have testified to the destiny of this ambitious Corsican who annexed at his zenith, like Caesar, a large part of Europe. Paintings, statuettes and popular refrains perpetuate its golden legend. One of his bicorn hats has just been sold for nearly 2 million euros at the Fontainebleau auction. Still alive and costumed for his advertisement, like Elvis.
The rhyme Napoleon had 500 floordates always hums. Decades after Waterloo, military marches to his glory kept him triumphant for posterity. Like the paintings of its official painter, Jacques-Louis David, responsible for beautifying it and trumpeting its fame. The French emperor was a king of communication, wearing his cocked hat as an “ego-badge”, so to speak, engraving his future epitaph. Mass killer (three million dead in his wars) or brilliant military strategist, it depends, but a living bridge between the monarchy and the French Republic and a salient figure in great History.
Cinema knew how to grasp its symbolic charge. From the beginnings of the 7e art, Louis Lumière, Alice Guy and other pioneers shot short films on its altar. In the Napoleon by Abel Gance, a silent masterpiece (1928) and marvel of technological innovation, he appeared half-angel, half-demon with the fiery eyes of Albert Dieudonné, a cut-out silhouette defying all the gods.
Stanley Kubrick dreamed of bringing the Napoleonic epic to the screen without being able to meet his pharaonic budget. Steven Spielberg is developing a television series based on the script of his illustrious compatriot. And so here it is on the big screen Napoleon by Ridley Scott, which makes many French people groan. Elements of fiction slip into the bio. No, Napoleon did not, among other historical heresies, shoot at the pyramids of Egypt. These imaginary scenes are a creative choice, but unnecessarily confuse his myth and the story of his life.
The enemy emperor of the British did not leave good memories on the other side of the Channel. Ridley Scott gets his head off two centuries later. In the blink of an eye, Napoleon, who led so many cavalry hussars, hugged Joséphine to the hussar in bed that evening. Bad lover with that…
A film, beyond ambitious battle scenes, too centered on the imperial couple, in tumultuous romance. Its 270-minute version which will be broadcast later on Apple TV+ is said to add parts of Joséphine’s youth. The leader of the Grande Armée would have deserved more attention to his strategies and policies, and to his Civil Code, among others, swept aside.
The image is spectacular. Homeric fights, scenes adapted from David’s paintings, sumptuous lighting. Ridley Scott measured himself against the film by Abel Gance, a tutelary work. On the technical side, music included, sound biopic impressed. The field of honor of Austerlitz and the Moscow set on fire by the Russians to avoid surrender are full of admirable plans, in the noise, the fury and the severed flesh. It remains to ignore a film shot mainly in Great Britain, in the language of the country, with the vast majority of Anglo-Saxon actors. We try to believe it, while being bored of France.
Joaquin Phoenix, remarkable in the roles of tortured men, offers scope neither to the military mastermind nor to the tyrant he embodies. His character often appears on the verge of tears, a sometimes pitiful clown and transfixed lover at the feet of his wife. Would a patriotic French filmmaker have injected it with more majesty? Without a doubt. Vanessa Kirby imposes more than Phoenix in Joséphine of fiery passions and imposed silences. Letizia, the emperor’s terrible mother, too often keeps quiet.
Thin scenario for a fierce and grandiose epic, full of victories and defeats, woven with exiles, reversals, reconquests, the art of transforming debacles into triumphs through the manipulation of crowds. Too many shortcuts, ellipses, poorly attached segments prevent this Napoleon to reveal the secrets of his destiny.
The spectator, bombarded with images, stranded with meaning, emerges confused from the 2 hours 38 minutes of projection, without detecting a coherent filmmaker’s vision. An elusive emperor whom hundreds of works have failed to reveal beyond the masks he had created for himself. The major film on this complex and bloodthirsty icon remains to be shot.