The story of Napoleon is effusive for cinema. There are series, there are films, but still great directors seem obsessed with the rise of an immigrant who became Emperor of France, dominated the world and ended his days exiled, defeated. Stanley Kubrick never finished his script, so when Ridley Scott announced his own project, I got excited. With Joaquin Phoenix in the title role, it seemed like a guaranteed hit. But I was mistaken.

The film that hit theaters at the end of 2023 is too long, too confusing, and worse, too wrong in terms of historical facts, cast, soundtrack… The proposal would be to focus on the love story between Napoleon Bonaparte and Josephine, one of the best-known in history. History, but not even that achieved it. Starting with the choice of actress: it would be Jodie Comer, then Vanessa Kirby, both much younger than the real Josephine when she met the general six years younger. Both in their 30s, they look their youthful while Joaquin, in his 40s, is a far cry from Bonaparte’s 26 years. It makes A LOT of difference in the narrative because his obsession with her also had to do with the emotional dominance that a lived-in woman had over him.

Strangely enough, Ridley has a good cast at his disposal who are paraded as extras, and there is no explanation or deepening of the political or strategic reasons that made Napoleon the military genius admired and studied to this day. What remains is a sequence of situations, time for battles, time for the couple to disagree and we barely get used to who is who or when things happen. Confused, empty, without any connection with the audience.

Given the historical errors of the battles, talking about the option of suggesting that the love story between the couple was anything but ‘love’ is bold, but not explored either. Vanessa Kirby is in a perpetual state of torpor, silence, submission, disgust, and even fear, but with so few lines from her, Josephine is a sphinx. No man excites her, no situation seems to shake her. Which ends up becoming a sexist suggestion of a woman who uses sex as currency and whose scenes accumulate to portray her as a wanton deliberately cheating on her husband. In the letters that survived between the two of them, we know that Napoleon was more passionate, but when she repeats the words of her letters, they sound strange that they come from such an indifferent woman.

There are disputes among experts as to Josephine’s true motivation for joining Napoleon, so the film’s suggestion that she is a practical woman is a fair and potentially interesting option. She was effectively a practical and daring woman, even for her time. It would be much more interesting to have explored this aspect, I agree. But she practically entered mute and left silent. Unfortunately.

I was devastated by the choice of script. It’s a film to quickly forget. Their story deserved more. Even more so, Josephine’s.

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