I have a soft spot for strange, awkward, not
quite Italians that yearn to be dictator of France. My interest in Bonaparte is
less grounded in historical fanboying, and more a way to use an impossibly
lofty aspiration to beat myself over the head: until my self esteem is as
lively as so many protesters after so much canister shot. Why am I not
supplanting the directory? Why have I not pushed the Austrians out of Italy
with an army that lacks for footwear? Oh woe Ect ect.
I watched the film Napoleon with a modest
understanding of the events, and spent much of my time working out who was
being depicted before the film name dropped them, and from that game I got a
fair bit of enjoyment. In that regard the film is fine, stop reading now.
The film has two threads, one is that Napoleonic
warfare looks fucking sick, and the other is that he really liked his hot
poshGF. Somewhere in this mix, the myth of ‘master of Europe’ gets lost. The
film is taking liberties with its depiction of events, I know I was there. Which
is ‘fine’ each scene could be a film unto itself, some short hand there can be
forgiven.
Though it commits the cardinal sin of making
Boney boring. You don’t try to take over the world without a pretty messed up
sense of self-worth, and ego. Write a megalomaniacal bratty sub and have it
come out dull, how? His historical one liners are bitchy as hell. At a time of
fervent nationalism this chucklefuck took the cake left to him by Marie
Antoinette, and carried it to Moscow and back. Humanizing such a figure is of
course an interesting endeavour, but making him feel like a sales director at a
stapler company is certainly a choice.
I am a bit of a josey-stan, admitted. Aren’t
we all? Josephine is, in my unqualified speculation, more influential in events
than historical accounts imply. As good as Boney was in reading the
battlefield, she was at reading people and the Parisian scene. The film is
interested in her, but only insofar as it relates to her romance with napoleon,
apart from her fucking; which the film even down plays. The fixation ends up
flattening her interesting and complex personal character (the being limited
scope, not the fucking)
The thing that I feel makes Napoleon
interesting is his Rizz. Boy had no game, and had the diplomatic skills of a
fermented herring. Though he was hugely popular both with the French people in
general and his troops in particular. It’s hard to imagine exactly how a person
must have acted in their day to day life, and to the film's credit, it doesn’t
really try. I feel like they nailed the bully boy bluster, but not the personal
magnetism, or headline grabbing fabrications he spun. The film knows these
qualities exist, but tells not shows them. It is unable to reconcile them into
its narrative.
The film's overarching conclusion is that
Josephine was the beauty and he the beast, which does them both a disservice,
and is more reductionist than the British tabloids of the day, at least they
were humorous. It’s the lack of mannerisms that I found to be the lost eagle standards.
Whether it was Boney rubbing his painful stomach, or Josephine covering her
awful teeth these little character details are strikingly absent. In trying to
‘humanize’ these painfully flawed people they made them into other people. The
only time he really felt like Napoleon was when he was going out his way to be
a dick to other emperors.
A lot is done to create a man behind the myth,
but I'd argue that the myth is an intrinsic element of the man. Imagine dear
scholars A, D.J. Khaled: Beyond the hype.
So my question is why bother? A deconstruction
is normally used to lay things bare, though this isn’t quite that. If we’re
going to slot any-old awkward romance in there, rather than one plausibly
theirs, we could have instead watched a two and half hour recreation of
waterloo (i know it exists), or austerlitz or jena or leipzig. They’re all
bangers, apart from borodino. Much as I long for big cannons, frontal assaults
and total encircling’s of the left flank; I’m certainly not against cringe
romance, in principle, and I’m not an expert (yeah, i know you knew that you
smug pricks) but it feels like they read the letters but didn’t really
understand them. Which I also didn’t, but I also don’t make films about the
dude you ‘know.
Despite having warped the history to make
these two threads complimentary, they end up being anathema. Each disrupts
detracts and contorts the other. Though I have to give the film credit for its
achievement, I never thought I'd find Napoleonic history lacklustre.
Okay, so that’s actually a lie, SHOCKER I
know. The book that turned me onto reading about the period was called
“Napoleon and the awakening of Europe,” published in 1954 and bought for a
fifty pence in a second hand bookshop that used to be a public toilet: the book
is weirdly paced and assumes, at least of the bits of it I read, a fair heft of
background knowledge. So maybe out of the clear and chasmous gaps in the
narrative of the film, other people will be inspired to learn more.
There’s a 2002 miniseries on Napoleon which is
worth watching, it’s about six hours long and ends up being far more
emotionally compelling, even if the budget is noticeably lacking.
Dynamite this film was not, get it? napoleon dynamite? Urghh. Not cool you guys.
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