Napoleon Bonaparte:
I found the crown of France in the gutter. I picked it up with the tip
of my sword and cleaned it, and placed it atop my own head. ~from Napoleon (2023)
Anytime a film is trashed by the Left it only makes me more curious to see what made them clutch their pearls. Yes, I know that Napoleon was not at Marie-Antoinette's execution and that in reality her hair was cut short and she wore white. And yet Marie-Antoinette is ritualistically and metaphorically dragged through the mud in most recent films and not one critic cares. So I finally was able to see Napoleon (2023) on Prime and found it to be a masterpiece, especially where sets, costumes and battle scenes are concerned. The scene where Napoleon and Josephine enter the Tuileries is a wonder. It really looks like the Tuileries, which was torn down after the Paris Commune in 1871. The coronation scene was magnificent and could have been a film in itself. And the soundtrack was a combination of classical composers with revolutionary chants as well as a moving original score. Why do the Wokesters hate it? Because it shows a confident man, a man's man, changing history? Leading troops into battle and valuing his soldiers? It is true that Napoleon, following the precedent begun by Louis XVI, chose people for offices and commands based upon merit rather than birth, and by so doing broke with long-standing tradition. Our current Woke Revolutionaries want to choose people for jobs based upon skin color or gender, as long as it is an oppressed skin color or gender. So naturally, a film about a successful white man conquering solely by his wits and military skill is an anathema to them.
I do think that Ridley Scott made the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine more brutish than it actually was; Napoleon came from Corsica but he was not a peasant. For that matter, peasants can be romantic and even write love songs. Napoleon's rough love-making was out of character on many levels. I am not saying he was not occasionally overcome by passion but I cannot see him being a beast. And Scott does not understand the charm, refinement and coquetry of a lady like Josephine which enchanted Napoleon, and everyone else. She could be seductive without being as vulgar and whorish as Scott imagines her. Especially with a subtle actress like Vanessa Kirby, who is entrancing in the role and does not need to be coarse in order to be sexy.
But to return to Napoleon and Marie-Antoinette... Napoleon was no where near Paris when Marie-Antoinette was killed. However, Scott begins the film with the spectacle of Marie-Antoinette and her two children hiding in a linen cupboard in the Tuileries while the palace is being ransacked by an angry mob. Then he cuts to the scene of Marie-Antoinette being publicly degraded on her way to death. While Napoleon was not there he heard about it, as did all of France. The Queen's murder was the subject of pamphlets, plays and even comedies, as is shown in the film. But her fate and that of her children haunted many. So when Napoleon gravitates to a forlorn, helpless widow with two children, it is not completely surprising. That he then spends his career trying to make that widow a queen, or more than a queen, an empress, is interesting. And that he eventually marries Marie-Antoinette's own niece is beyond irony. In the film the girl playing Marie-Louise resembles her not at all. Marie-Louise was tall and fair like most of the other Habsburgs, like Marie-Antoinette. What the film does not say is that the marriage contract Napoleon sent to Vienna was the exact contract used to arrange the marriage of the Dauphin Louis (Louis XVI) with the Austrian Archduchess Maria Antonia (Marie-Antoinette). And yet there can be no doubt that he really loved Josephine, for he died saying her name.
Napoleon is a film about an enigmatic man and an enigmatic woman who brought each other passion and fame and then died separated by years and by miles. Each built on the legends that had gone before, becoming legends in their own right. They came to power on the tide of a Revolution meant to bring perfect equality, obtaining a higher rank than any French rulers since Charlemagne. Such irony is at the heart of the Bonaparte mythos, and perhaps the foundation of the power of our contemporary elites, who speak to us of liberty, equality and fraternity while amassing great wealth and power. And as they do so, they are forging our chains.
Of course, the French hate the film. From The New Yorker:
Americans are
so used to seeing history played by Americans that the oddity of it
hardly registers anymore. Charlton Heston was the Spanish El Cid and the
Hebrew Egyptian Moses and the Judean Ben-Hur—believe it or not, he won
an Oscar for that one—and his Midwestern accents were taken for granted
whomever he played and wherever the character was supposed to have
lived.
And why not? No one expects the
actors in a production of “Julius Caesar” to speak good Latin. Fiction
is the premise of all fictions, and that simple truth, along with the
(perhaps declining) companion truth that, for the most part, movie stars
are made in America, is enough to explain the phenomenon. Indeed, the
whole point and rationale—the raison d’être, as we say in English—of the
theatrical arts is to extend our circles of compassion through acts of
creative empathy: we want people who are unlike the characters
they play to inhabit them so that in acts of sympathetic resonance we
too expand ourselves. It’s why we love Laurence Olivier’s Shylock, or,
for that matter, Russell Crowe’s gladiator.
Yet,
when one has something, if no more than a big toe, resting in another
culture, the oddity resonates. Though Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon,
for the most part ably, in Ridley Scott’s much talked-of new movie
of the Emperor’s life and battles, it’s still disconcerting that he
says his lines not only in English but more or less with exactly the
same accents—and using exactly the same slightly paralyzed set of
expressions—with which he inhabited
Johnny Cash. The cast of his character remains the cast of his
character, which, in classic movie-star manner, Phoenix adjusts but does
not significantly vary from role to role; he is no Lon Chaney, nor
nearly an Olivier, inventing a new face and voice for each role.
This
oddity has not been missed in the French reception to the film. Almost
all French commentators italicize the ambiguities of Napoleon’s
historical role—was he the reincarnation of Alexander the Great or the
sinister precursor of Hitler? Perhaps the sole exception is the
far-right polemicist and onetime Presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, who contributed a laudatory story to the far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles
with the cover line “L’empereur anti-woke.” “Woke” has become, however
improbably, an omnipresent borrowed word in French polemics,
particularly on the anti-American far right. You might suppose that
those who believe that America is colonizing French culture would find a
French word around which to organize their disdain, but they don’t.
They use the American word—disdainfully, but they do. It’s as if, in
anti-French polemics, we insisted on condemning their undue sang-froid. Apparently, no one has stopped to consider the power of a culture that forced you to borrow its language to condemn it.
But
most of the arguments against “Napoleon” were about language in another
way, and more nettled. “The film is not troubled by the fact that these
two . . . warring factions speak the same language (English), which
never ceases to feel odd,” a film critic at Le Monde wrote. “Directed by a Briton who has long reigned over Hollywood, Napoleon
is a film that essentially reminds us that the Empire has changed hands
since Waterloo.” (With that slightly gnomic formula, the critic means
that Hollywood runs the world as once the French did.) One can, to be
sure, only imagine how Americans would feel seeing a wildly expensive
and elaborate movie made about the life of Abraham Lincoln with Gérard
Depardieu in the lead, and with wartime Washington perfectly realized
and Gettysburg thrillingly re-created, but with everyone from bedroom to
battlefield muttering and roaring in guttural French and using
idiomatic French expressions to summon up the American ones—“Ah, alors!,” “Sacré bleu,” “Monsieur le President,”
and so on. Such a film would convey the surreal cultural dislocation,
not to mention unintended comedy, that “Napoleon” provokes in native
French speakers. This is not so much a vexed issue of cultural
appropriation as a more straightforward one of comic incongruity. Though
languages do not, in truth, enclose singular domains of meaning,
there are still patterns of behavior, ways of addressing the world,
acculturated norms of discourse and style, that affect all members of a
linguistic practice.
To take one subtle and
circular example, the French aristocrats in “Napoleon” are played mostly
by English actors affecting upper-crust English accents that rather
betray the equivalent speech pattern in French, which is not clipped and
reserved but sonorous and rhetorically sinuous. (The foreign minister
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand would not hesitate to orate at his
emperor, rather than interrogate him politely, as he does here.) That
rhetorical tone of French conversation—still dominant now, and
overwhelming in the very rhetorical early nineteenth century—is
dislodged by the clipped manner of those Brits, not to mention the
Method-y pauses and mumblings with which Phoenix works, in a style that
is eerily Brando-esque. (Who also once undertook to play Napoleon.)
But
this means that, when an actual British upper-cruster, in this case the
Duke of Wellington, played by Rupert Everett, appears, he has to go way
over the top in order to distinguish himself from the clipped Brits
playing the French. He has to become a kind of outrageous caricature of
English upper-crustness, all snorts and sneers, so that (this is the
circular bit) he ends up performing exactly like the horse-faced and
humorless Brits traditionally caricatured by the French, as in, for
instance, the Astérix comics. (Read more.)
Historical inaccuracies, HERE. And author Sandra Gulland discusses why Josephine was infertile, HERE.
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