Napoleon: the many wrongs and one right of the new biopic

 Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is baffling. From the get go, the miscasting of Joaquin Phoenix as the eponymous antihero is fatal. The actor looks every day of his fifty years, and yet he plays Napoleon from the age of 27, when he first made his mark on the bloody post-Revolution scene of a France in the throes of the Terror. Phoenix’s Napoleon mumbles unintelligibly throughout the film, and is as stripped of charisma as he is of energy, which flies in the face of the historical record of a dynamic leader who commanded the loyalty of his armies and the adulation of the masses of his countrymen. Scott’s Napoleon is a caricature, petulant, childish, boorish, besotted with Josephine and putty in her hands. 

The historical Josephine was a few years older and more worldly than the young Bonaparte, whereas Vanessa Kirby, who plays her, is decades younger than Phoenix, which changes the whole dynamic of the onscreen relationship. Kirby does not seem to have a grip on her role, playing Josephine as mindlessly promiscuous, unfaithful, and alternately Napoleon’s muse and his victim. The sex scenes between them are so joyless and off putting that it is hard to believe in a grand passion. 

I was particularly attentive to the brief scenes set during Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt, having studied it extensively for my historical novel The Naqib’s Daughter. There is no record of Bonaparte firing a cannon at the top of the Cheops Pyramid. Moreover, it is hard to believe that he left his army stranded in Egypt and escaped back to France because he heard that Josephine had taken a lover, rather than because, supremely ambitious as he was, he realized that his mission in Egypt had failed and history would pass him by while the real action was taking place on European soil. 

Rupert Everett’s cameo as Napoleon’s nemesis the Duke of Wellington is equally one-note, a permanent curled lip of aristocratic disdain and an apocryphal sense of English fair play, a portrayal that reminds the viewer that Ridley Scott is an Englishman. 

So, to sum up, why should a prospective viewer watch this two and a half hour film, but only on the widest possible screen in a theatre ? Because of the gorgeously reproduced landscapes of the battle scenes, familiar paintings come to life, history unfolding, Austerlitz, the march on Moscow. That is Ridley Scott’s forte. That is where we get a glimpse of the military genius behind the historic victories and the ultimately arrogant overreach of the Corsican who came from nothing and conquered Europe before he lost everything. 

The closing credits enumerate the hundreds of thousands who died in battle in the Napoleonic wars. But if Scott’s intention is to condemn wars of ambition, why then are the battle scenes rendered so glamorously? Baffling.

Playing Barbie in Nasser’s Egypt

 Playing Barbie in Sixties Egypt

 

In the early Sixties, in Nasser’s “socialist” Egypt, you could not come by anything imported, and I absolutely longed for a Barbie doll. When an uncle went to the States, he brought back one for me. The stereotypical Barbie, of course, there was no other at the time, and she came with just the swimsuit she stood up in. Ordering additional outfits or accessories was out of the question, but that was not a problem. 

I was on the older side to be playing with dolls, anyway, and the pleasure, for me, was designing, cutting and sewing dresses for my Barbie. There were always plenty of fabric scraps left over from the summer frocks and nightgowns the “little dressmaker” ran up for me on a freestanding, iron Singer sewing machine that occupied most of a small room in our house. My mother could not sew to save her life, but it was common in those days to have a dressmaker come to one’s house to do the sewing, and I can still conjure the sound of that foot pedal running “drrrrrrrrr” from the sewing room, off and on for hours at the beginning of every season. 

For proper dresses the dressmaker often copied patterns from Burda, a German magazine, painstakingly expanding them to scale and size on butcher paper, and then cutting the fabric along the lines. Then came the lengthy process of fittings, which I hated, having to stand on a stool while having the dress carefully slipped over my head, first with the fabric held together with prickly pins, then very loosely stitched at the seams, then finally sewn up properly on the Singer sewing machine, the hems and linings finished by hand.

So I always had plenty of fabric scraps for my Barbie’s dresses: cotton lawn, silk chiffon, even upholstery velvet. I started with boat neck shifts, as they were the easiest style to cut, and stitched them up with a handheld sewing tool like a large stapler. It came in handy, since I was the despair of my governess, who had tried in vain to teach me the simplest of stem stitches. She herself truly had what she called in French “fairy hands,” but I was my mother’s daughter when faced with needle and thread.

Now that I look at my grandaughter’s generation, surrounded by multiple Barbies with closets full of ready-made Barbie clothes and accessories, their gigantic doll houses and Barbie cars and swimming pools, none of which seem to hold children’s attention for more than a couple of hours, it makes me wonder. I know I had endless hours of entertainment with the creative process of dressing up my mannequin doll.  It makes me wonder. Was I really so deprived in comparison, with my one Barbie and her homemade clothes in Sixties Egypt?