2023-11-25 09:24:31
NAPOLEON. In the rooms
Why focus on Ridley Scott and his neomelodic and Fantozzian Napoleon, with the Oedipal worm and the passion for hasty sex? Why focus on that millimetric strategist Napoleon, rock star with a phobia of cannon fire, the conqueror who covers his ears when the pum pum goes up, the visionary of war who seems like a director behind the camera? Why focus on that joking commander Bonaparte capable of making faces at an Egyptian pharaoh in the sarcophagus, narcissus to the bone but even capable of pity in the face of Marie Antoinette’s curled head rolling on the gallows?
The hand in the waistcoat is not there and none of the other tics given to us by history books. Instead, in almost every sequence, there is the famous felucca, the two-cornered hat with a blue, white and red cockade. Ridley Scott doesn’t pay attention to clichés: if they are needed, he makes them a narrative amplifier of his shouted, emphatic, contradictory cinema, developed like a circus parade.
Don’t be wrong: Napoleon is an excellent film although full of defects, imperfections, hypertrophy, deformations, pop imbalances and bad harmonies. With Michelangelo’s naturalism of the battles, certain erratic historical relationships, an impertinent discharge of meanings on the psychoanalytic side of the emperor and an exaggerated attention for Josephine de Beauharnais, mischievous widow of a guillotined husband and great seductress, two dependent children and an intelligence out of the ordinary. She, says Ridley, drove Soldier N crazy and was the real driving force behind the couple.
Caliber, this is especially lacking in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon who at 85 is pleased with the spectacular performance of his 200 million dollar meatloaf and doesn’t care about the protests and controversies. Everything comes together in a digital-muscular blockbuster filmed for Apple TV in a longer and probably more satisfying version, written with David Scarpa and now in theaters in a length reduced by a third for Eagle Pictures. Nothing adds to the myth of the little Corsican general, but Scott can say that he has taken a step forward in the march of romantic-heroic cinema, the one he feels most and has been his strong point from the Duelists, Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator up to to The Last Duel and the not very successful House of Gucci.
The film starts in 1789 during the revolution, with Robespierre in the background, the Terror, the citoyens in turmoil and the blade of the guillotine falling on the heads of the nobles. Napoleon gave a sign of yes shortly afterwards, taking the besieged port of Toulon and thus handing it back to the Republic and gaining the rank of general.
Then the rise, battle after battle, carnage after carnage, to the crown of emperor, beloved by the soldiers, rather shy in courting Josephine, who becomes empress, grants him multiple lovers, but reciprocates with a selection of young men. The two argue on the sofa like a bourgeois couple, they are unable to have children, they flay each other and come to absorb each other’s betrayals: moral sense is not their strong point. They are like Lord and Lady Macbeth racing towards inevitable power. And here the duet between the American Joaquin Phoenix and the British Vanessa Kirby is worth the almost two hours and 40 minutes of film. Better her than him, in this case. And we’ll see who comes closest to the Oscar.
Everyone knows that Napoleon had a war bug. That he cared for his family, was alternately a crybaby and a cynical fighter, that he looked to Europe for his conquests and that he was adored by his troops, too. Scott proceeds in spurts, follows the thread of the battles with omissions and poetic license, from Borodino to Austerlitz to the uncovered Pyramids, from the coronation to the ruinous Russian campaign, with the exile on Elba there and back again, the disastrous interlude at Waterloo in front of the armies of the Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett) and the new, definitive exile on the island of St. Helena until 5 May 1821 remembered by Manzoni’s poetry.
In this uproar, private Bonaparte finds the time to divorce Josephine for reasons of state, marries the younger Maria Luigia and finally has an heir. There is a caricatural quality in the characters, as if Scott felt free to express his all-British vision of that part of the world and to make the film he had been waiting for all his life, cramming the entire dictionary of his cinema.
At the point of the bayonet, Scott reiterates that, for sure, Napoleon was a special man, a true Frenchman, an interpreter of grandeur, a proud and melancholic warrior who had raised the Crown from the mud. Whose last words were: France, army, Giuseppina. So sure of his own success that he appears snobbish and bored. Thinking of all the actors who have lent his face, from Charles Boyer and Marlon Brando to Rod Steiger and Daniel Auteuil, one might say that Joaquin Phoenix, playing on the sidelines and bordering on the grotesque, gives us the portrait of a melancholic warmonger who made and sub History, obsessed with gunpowder, with the need to leave a trace of himself from his mother’s shadow.
NAPOLEON di Ridley Scott
(USA-Great Britain, 2023, duration 158′, Eagle Pictures)
with Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Ben Miles, Ludivine Saigner, Ian McNeice, John Hollingworth
Rating: *** out of 5
In the rooms
November 25, 2023 | 08:23
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