going from bed to battlefield

An antisocial, a rebel, an insecure person. This is the Napoleon he presents Ridley Scottcon Joaquin Phoenix as an unquestionable center of attention.

Which it is, until it isn’t.

This Napoleon by Ridley Scott is, unfortunately, more like his latest productions (The Gucci, The last duel), in which the director of Alien y Blade Runner He seems to lose his compass and make poor decisions when it comes to what he wants to privilege. Always counting on great performers, Joaquin Phoenix is ​​a character as stoic as he is ambivalent and even unprotected.

And like every Napoleon gets his Waterloo, Napoleon also gets his Ridley Scott film.

The film begins in the middle of the French Revolution, when Marie Antoinette is guillotined, before Napoleon’s eyes – an obvious poetic license from the screenwriter. And no, artillery officer at that time, Bonaparte does not approach and lick the guillotine like the vampire Pinochet did in Countby Pablo Larraín.

At the time, after saving Toulon in 1793, putting an end to the Age of Terror in 1794 and the coup d’état in which he participated in 1799, we arrive at his coronation as emperor, in 1804.

And there’s still an hour and a half left.

Scott adds to the bedroom problems with scenes of six battles, when in another era he did the other way around. There are strong moments – not when he makes love to Josephine like a puppy -: the English knock him off his white horse with a cannon shot.

They are details, such as passing a letter from Josephine around his neck, playing throwing pebbles in his office or leaving the person who tells him about his wife’s sexual deception without eating dessert or showing him crying during his public divorce. Does that make you more empathetic? Does it make him more human and less bronze?

Scott doesn’t tell anything new, there are no side or secondary characters that explain or magnify who the protagonist was. He puts it or better, exposes it to the actor of Joker to say phrases or have attitudes like those already mentioned, which rather than constructing, impoverish the artist’s vision of the character.

The script by David Scarpa (who also wrote the script for All the money in the worldby Scott) diverts attention to the soldier and places it at times on Josephine.

While there is a certain dynamic between the cuckold that makes up Joaquin Phoenix and the scheming Vanessa Kirbyit is that same strange relationship between the French emperor and Josephine that Scott privileged, leaving his forte in the background: images of epic confrontation, whether in Gladiator or Robin Hood and even in Black Hawk Down.

It is true that Napoleon left his battle in Egypt to return to France as soon as he found out that Josephine was being unfaithful to him. The relationship is passionate, at times brutal and almost always manipulative. It is even stated that Napoleon was nothing without Josephine, and without her mother.

How Napoleon’s exile on the Island of Saint Helena is recounted, and the epistolary correspondence he maintained with Josephine, already divorced and with a bastard son, seem to lengthen the plot instead of nourishing it.

Vanessa Kirby (Fragments of a womanPrincess Margaret in The Crown) adds intrigue to his Josephine, almost always in interior scenes. Scott orchestrates astonishingly complex scenes in the battles, perhaps Austerliz’s is one to remember, but where he throws all the meat on the grill is the one in which Napoleon ends up defeated, Waterloo.

This is the Scott of Napoleon: chooses to sacrifice a psychological study of the protagonist in order to make him human. The show must go on, and that’s why the fighting is the best part of the movie.

Drama/Action. United States, 2023. Original title: “Napoleon”. 158′. SAM; 13 R. Of: Ridley Scott. Con: Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Rupert Everett. Salas: IMAX, Cinemark Caballito, Hoyts Dot, Cinépolis Recoleta, Showcase Belgrano and Norcenter.