2023-11-20 08:23:27
Even before Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” arrives in theaters, it comes under fire. Television historian Dan Snow complained in a viral TikTok post that the military commander never bombed the pyramids. And when Marie-Antoinette, the last French queen, was beheaded, her hair was shaved and no blonde curls, as seen in the trailer. And Napoleon was certainly not standing in the crowd in person and, equipped with Joaquin Phoenix’s most arrogant cleft lip, acknowledged the terrible spectacle unmoved.
Ridley Scott, in turn, told Snow that he should get a life rather than waste his time on such nonsense. And Scott, one of the great strategists of American cinema, is of course right. For the purposes of the film, it is completely irrelevant whether Marie-Antoinette’s long or short hair was curled on October 6, 1793. And the fact that Scott and his screenwriter David Scarpa quickly mix their protagonist into the crowd is a clever cinematic move: it’s all about compression. Which sometimes is nothing other than poetry.
So much of the life of the man born on August 15, 1769 in Ajaccio, Corsica, is hidden in the war fog of history. “What really happened on October 5, 1795 remains a mystery,” writes his biographer Adam Zamoyski, although the events of that day were crucial for the revolution and for the man, Napoleone Buonaparte, as he was christened in Italian . “But his role in it is the most elusive,” writes Zamoyski.
also read
„The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes“
We’re talking about the day when Napoleon apparently had dozens of cannons brought in quickly before sunrise in order to put down a royalist uprising against the young republic, whose military head he had just put in a coup. Napoleon, so to speak, defended the rule of the people against the people who, after many years of revolution and reign of terror, longed for the ordering hand of a king. Napoleon, however, had built his previous career and his future on the republic, which alone guaranteed him unhindered social mobility. What did he care about the opinion of the mob?
Historians also argue about the validity of central quotes attributed to him. “A man like me gives a shit about the lives of a million people,” Napoleon is said to have hurled at Austria’s Foreign Minister Metternich on June 26, 1813, who was in the process of successfully luring him into a fatal war against Europe’s allies . Metternich spreads the sentence in his memoirs. You don’t have to look at Israel and Gaza to understand that in war the first victim is always the truth, the corpse of which is left by partisan propaganda.
The vast majority of what we know about such a figure of the century, not to mention what we don’t know, cannot be packed into just under three hours anyway. Scott, at almost 86 years old one of the most battle-hardened directors in the world, who has made almost as many films as Napoleon fought battles (56 vs. 61), cleverly tells a life in highlights. The mentioned battle with the royalists in 1795 is among them. As usual, outwardly unmoved, Napoleon gives the order to fire. The cannons roar. The bullets fly. The smoke clears. Those loyal to the king lie in pieces. Napoleon’s rapid rise continues – once again, as always, over corpses.
In the Russian winter: “Napoleon”
What: Apple TV+
It began with the Battle of Toulon, when the young officer came up with the daring plan to take two forts controlled by the English. The cannons there could then be used to fire on the English fleet in the harbor and the city would have to surrender. The young commander, not yet 25 at the time, demonstrated brilliant calculation, but he was also a daredevil. He threw himself into battle, as was his habit. A cannonball shot the horse out from under him. This historically documented scene can also be found in the film. After the victorious battle, Napoleon rummages around in the animal’s intestines, fishes out the ball, throws it to his brother Lucien and says: “For mother.”
Women play a central role in his life. “Say that you are nothing without me – and without your mother,” Joséphine de Beauharnais (absolutely brilliant: Vanessa Kirby) breathes to her husband. Napoleon, played by Phoenix as the strange sociopath his biographers say he was, courted her in monosyllables until she, as no stranger to social ambition as he was, agreed to the marriage. A few scenes earlier, he stormed home in a rage from the Egyptian campaign – which was going rather poorly, regardless of the question of whether he actually shot at the pyramids or not. The way the contemporary tabloid press spread the rumors of Joséphine’s affair had reached Cairo. Phoenix has just stood in front of the Sphinx (here Scott respectfully copies the famous painting “Bonaparte in front of the Sphinx” by Jean-Léon Gérome) and held a silent conversation with a mummified pharaoh. Now he angrily hits the folding table with the newspaper. Now we’re off home, risking the accusation that he deserted.
“Whose country is this?” he shouts at the Directorate, a short-lived puppet of power after the fall of the revolutionary leader Robespierre, who wants to reprimand him for his unauthorized departure. “Mine.” The unabashed coronation as emperor will soon follow. In reality, there are years in between. The film pushes the pace. This is definitely in the spirit of the main character. “I have found France’s crown in the gutter,” Napoleon brusquely abbreviates the enthronement ceremony, “and I am placing it on my own head.” The church plays along for better or for worse, it is happy that it survived the revolution relatively unscathed. Europe’s noble houses all around are turning up their noses at the Corsican bully, who has uninhibitedly punched his way to the top.
Complete battle painting
Scott reported in an interview that Phoenix had problems getting into the role for a long time. They met two weeks before filming began and discussed everything in detail. The whole book has changed and become bigger and better. The film doesn’t come terribly close to the general and ruler. His psyche and his true motives remain contradictory. The decision to leave out childhood and youth on Corsica and at cadet schools serves the narrative economy, but leaves crucial things in the dark: the genesis of excessive ambition, misanthropy, the decision to seek one’s own advancement through cunning, deception and limitless escalation of violence. Phoenix himself advises interested viewers to turn to one of the countless biographies for a better understanding of this necessarily labored life. Or you have to wait for Steven Spielberg’s seven-part HBO series, which that other Hollywood giant is currently developing based on a Kubrick project that never came to fruition.
Nevertheless, Scott’s film is a masterpiece, a complete battle painting the likes of which have not been seen since “Braveheart” or “Gladiator”. The Battle of Austerlitz in particular, in which Napoleon lures his enemies onto a frozen lake in order to then drown them in a hail of cannon bullets, has an intensity and terrible beauty that will go down in history in a similar way to the epoch-making event, that she illustrates.
Here you will find content from third parties
In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
#Ridley #Scotts #Napoleon #Complete #Battle #Painting