Napoleon and Me (film review)
Jun. 29th, 2007 06:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakMore films at the Munich Film Festival:
Napoleon and Me: Italian film (with French and American co-producers) which managed to pull off something tricky, a comedy that doesn't trivialize the fairly serious themes it deals with. Martino, a young idealistic teacher living on Elba, wants to assassinate Napoleon once he hears the later is banished to this island. Now anyone who knows a little bit of history is aware he won't succeed, so that's not even a question. The film goes for a mixture of comic foils by accident and increasingly Martino being taken in by Napoleon's charme (he's hired as a secretary and thus in constant proximity of his wannabe target); it also never lets us forget the original reason for the assasination plan - as Martino tells his students at the beginning, in one single Napoleonic battle as many soldiers died as Elba has inhabitants. Martino, as befitting his age and the age, is something of a romantic poseur at the beginnning; the idea of death, both of death as in "assassination/tyrranicide" and of death as in the deaths of those soldiers is abstract, as is the idea of liberty; he manages to talk of the people and completely overlook the maid who makes much of his life possible. And of course Napoleon is an expert in posing, and very aware he's The Emperor in (temporary) Exile; one of the reasons why Martino gets hired is to record memorable utterances, after all. Martino, through the course of the film, gets to find out about death and disillusion and hate in a non-abstract way, and his reaction there is very different. Napoleon (played by the excellent French actor Daniel Auteuil) remains an enigma throughout, and refreshingly free of certain cinematic clichés post WWII. The film gets across personal charme, quirks and the absolute chilling ruthlessness which allows for all those deaths in battle (and not just there); it never falls into either the Great Man of History or the Ranting Tyrant trap.
The supporting characters all come to vivid life; Martino's older brother and sister, who raised him, his mistress (or rather, the lady who keeps him as her boytoy, as she's married and about twenty years older, and a delightful lazily amused cynic, played by Monica Belluci), Martino's old mentor (a key character) and Napoleon's Egyptian servant Rustan. All in all a film definitely worth watching.
***
One Heroes fanfic rec: Syncretic Division is a great look at Nathan during the season finale.
Napoleon and Me: Italian film (with French and American co-producers) which managed to pull off something tricky, a comedy that doesn't trivialize the fairly serious themes it deals with. Martino, a young idealistic teacher living on Elba, wants to assassinate Napoleon once he hears the later is banished to this island. Now anyone who knows a little bit of history is aware he won't succeed, so that's not even a question. The film goes for a mixture of comic foils by accident and increasingly Martino being taken in by Napoleon's charme (he's hired as a secretary and thus in constant proximity of his wannabe target); it also never lets us forget the original reason for the assasination plan - as Martino tells his students at the beginning, in one single Napoleonic battle as many soldiers died as Elba has inhabitants. Martino, as befitting his age and the age, is something of a romantic poseur at the beginnning; the idea of death, both of death as in "assassination/tyrranicide" and of death as in the deaths of those soldiers is abstract, as is the idea of liberty; he manages to talk of the people and completely overlook the maid who makes much of his life possible. And of course Napoleon is an expert in posing, and very aware he's The Emperor in (temporary) Exile; one of the reasons why Martino gets hired is to record memorable utterances, after all. Martino, through the course of the film, gets to find out about death and disillusion and hate in a non-abstract way, and his reaction there is very different. Napoleon (played by the excellent French actor Daniel Auteuil) remains an enigma throughout, and refreshingly free of certain cinematic clichés post WWII. The film gets across personal charme, quirks and the absolute chilling ruthlessness which allows for all those deaths in battle (and not just there); it never falls into either the Great Man of History or the Ranting Tyrant trap.
The supporting characters all come to vivid life; Martino's older brother and sister, who raised him, his mistress (or rather, the lady who keeps him as her boytoy, as she's married and about twenty years older, and a delightful lazily amused cynic, played by Monica Belluci), Martino's old mentor (a key character) and Napoleon's Egyptian servant Rustan. All in all a film definitely worth watching.
***
One Heroes fanfic rec: Syncretic Division is a great look at Nathan during the season finale.
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Date: 2007-06-29 07:20 pm (UTC)Just had to share that. *g*
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