Ridley Scott has been typically dismissive of critics taking issue with his forthcoming movie Napoleon, particularly French ones.
While his big-screen epic, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the embattled French emperor with Vanessa Kirby as his wife Josephine, has earned the veteran director plaudits in the UK, French critics have been less gushing, with Le Figaro saying the film could have been called “Barbie and Ken under the Empire,” French GQ calling the film “deeply clumsy, unnatural and unintentionally clumsy” and Le Point magazine quoting biographer Patrice Gueniffey calling the film “very anti-French and pro-British.”
Asked by the BBC to respond, Scott replied with customary swagger:
“The French don’t even like themselves. The audience that I showed it to in Paris, they loved it.”
The film’s world premiere took place in the French capital this week.
Scott added he would say to historians questioning the accuracy of his storytelling:
“Were you there? Oh you weren’t there. Then how do you know?”
Anti French? Do the French still deny that they were the bad guys of Europe when Napoleon was in power? Of course they look like the bad guys in this movie. That’s like the Germans complaining that they’re made to look like the bad guys in ww2 movies.
Do the French still deny that they were the bad guys of Europe when Napoleon was in power?
Of course, we generally deny it.
But some historical perspective first. When the French Revolution happened, everyone in Europe started to fight the new French regime to get the old monarchy back in power, with all privileges for the nobles to be reinstated. The French fought back for years, and Napoleon then came to power and continued the wars. He kinda got carried away. But every time he tried to settle down, the freaking English would start a new alliance against him and his new satellite regimes.
Now where does the assholery start? When defending yourself? No! When counterattacking a bit too much? No! When reinstating absolute power when you were chosen to stop absolutism in the first place? Maybe a bit. When trying to fuck up the English? Certainly not! When trying to rule over all of Europe? No, it was only inertia.
You know, when you sometimes wake up with the wrong foot, so you just have to march an army into Russia. Ughh, hate it when that happens.
Why is Napoleon the bad guy? He was just an acting person. When Napoleon was the bad guy, then someone was the good guy. I don’t see any absolute monarch as a good guy.
There is no denying of him being a bad guy, because this idea itself for what happens in history is utterly stupid.
Who told you there’s a good guy and a bad guy in real life? In any case, all those soldiers, civilians and regular people who died in the Napoleonic wars weren’t monarchs. And to say Napoleon was waring out of some altruistic desire to free the poor from monarchy? Come the fuck on, he made himself a monarch!
