This is the best summary I could come up with:
The critic for the left-wing daily Libération panned the film as not just ugly, but vacuous, positing nothing and “very sure of its inanity.” The review in Le Monde offered that if the director’s vision had one merit, it was “simplicity” — “a montage alternating between Napoleon’s love life and his feats of battle.”
As the French writer Sylvain Tesson once famously said, “France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell.” How else would you expect a country where the perennial response to “How are you?” is “Not bad” to respond to a historical film about itself?
More than 200 years after his death, the smudge of Napoleon’s fingerprints still liberally decorates the country and its capital: along the streets and metro stations named after his generals and battles; from atop the Arc de Triomphe that he planned; in the gleam of the gold dome of the Invalides, under which his giant marble tomb rises.
In recent decades, Napoleon’s record for misogyny, imperialism and racism — he reimposed slavery eight years after the revolutionary government abolished it — has come under glaring critical light.
To many, Napoleon is the symbol of a France that has come under assault from what they consider an American import of identity politics and “wokeism.” The latest front page of the weekly far-right magazine Valeurs Actuelles declared him “The Anti-Woke Emperor.” (Its reviewer also panned the film: From the first scene, the viewer knows that “historical accuracy will suffer the guillotine,” wrote Laurent Dandrieu.)
Instead of a regal leader with insatiable energy and ambition, Joaquin Phoenix portrays a regular grasping mortal who is the product of a bloodthirsty, barbaric upheaval — something that some find “very destabilizing,” Chevallier said, but that he considered interesting and instructive, “because you understand why Napoleon inspired such hate” among other European powers at the time.
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Son_of_dad@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I never realized until this movie that France outright refuses to accept that they were kind of the bad guys of Europe during Napoleon’s reign. They deny any wrong doing and keep saying “he was anti monarchy though!” As if it were monarchs and not regular folk dying all over those battlefields.
Anyways it’s funny watching the French get twisted up that this movie makes them look like the bad guys, they also don’t seem to realize Ridley Scott movies are historical fiction. I’m any case, this is like Germans being mad that they were made to look like the bad guys in ww2 movies.
drolex@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Napoleon is the bad guy. And the English are the good guys, obviously. Napoleon’s hat looks like shit. The English are Europe’s saviours. The English are great. I hate Napoleon because French cheese is too strong for my taste.
Statements uttered by the mentally unhinged.
Son_of_dad@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Who said anything about the English? What are you on about?
spark947@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Napoleon was a villain, but he is definitely an interesting historical figure. Movie looks like it turns him into a cartoon villain. I haven’t seen it, but given ridley Scott’s recent output, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a boring, melodramatic mess.
Veraxus@kbin.social 1 year ago
Ridley’s theatrical epics are like “first drafts” anyway. I’ll always wait for the extended edition or Director’s Cut. They are always infinitely better. Every time.