Film Reviews
Directed, produced, and written by David
Grubin. 2003; color; 240 min. Distributed by PBS
Home Video.
NAPOLÉON. Directed by Yves Simoneau. Produced by
Jean-Pierre Guérin and Gerard Depardieu. Written by
Didier Decoin. 2003; color; 280 minutes. Distributed
by A&E Home Video.
NAPOLEON.
Thirty years ago, Louis Bergeron published a history of
the First Empire—L'épisode napoléonien, aspects intérieurs, 1799-1815 (1972)—that scarcely mentioned Napoleon Bonaparte. One cannot expect a television
documentary to attempt the equivalent; if any figure in
modern times deserves Great Man treatment, surely it
is Napoleon. Stil!, one would hope that, two centuries
after his rise to power, we would have progressed
beyond the "man of destiny" approach that too evidently shapes David Grubin's documentary. "He
doesn't die, he will never die": these closing words,
voiced by Jean-Paul Bertaud, may have been intended
to laud Bonaparte's success at crafting his posthumous
legend. But they suit all too well an awestruck documentary whose picture of Napoleon's significance is
blinkered to exclude all but his own blazing light.
The format of Grubin's documentary (part of PBS's
"Empires" series) will be familiar to anyone who has
caught a glimpse of the History Channel It features a
large cast of talking heads. Its historical reenactments
star actors whose faces are off-screen, except when in
crowd or battle scenes (shown, as a rule, in slow
motion). Visual images are used simply as illustration
and are hardly ever mentioned—let alone analyzed—by the script. Francisco Goya's paintings and
etchings flash by during the very brief discussion of
Napoleon's Spanish wars, but not a whisper is given to
the artist's name or his mission.
It would be a great shame if the documentary shows
up in high school or college classrooms. This is the tale
of Napoleon as fighter and lover. Military and personal
history overwhelm any political or social content.
Twelve minutes are spent on the battle of Austerlitz,
and twelve on Waterloo, but considerably fewer than
twelve, over the course of the documentary's four
episodes, on matters of state such as Napoleon's
administrative and legal reforms. Attention is doled
out in strange proportions. The Eighteenth Brumaire
does not arrive until nearly halfway through the 225minute documentary (one reason so little time is left to
discuss Napoleon's policies as consul and emperor).
The Napoleonic state is reduced to the Napoleonic
person: Joseph Fouché and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand each gets a brief mention (Fouché so that
Napoleonic France may be branded "a police state")
and then vanishes, never to reappear. Germaine de
Staël and Benjamin Constant are notable no-shows.
With no mention made of the Confederation of the
Rhine or the Cisalpine Republic, it is no wonder that
the documentary fails to discuss Napoleon's catalyzing
influence on German and Italian nationalism. Besides
noting that the Civil Code (barely introduced) was
spread across Europe and that the Venice ghetto was
opened, no attention is given to the effects of French
conquest on other lands. We could use more of this,
even if it required paring down the discussion of
Napoleon's liking for macaroni.
Remarkably little time is given to events preceding
Maximilien Robespierre's fall—apparently, the revolution will not be televised—and the attempt to sketch
the revolutionary prelude in a few minutes leads to
simplistic and misleading condensation. (The crowds
storming the Bastille were not "crying liberty, equality,
brotherhood' "; nor, I think, was the "monarchy . . .
totter[ing] at the edge of destruction" on that day.)
Inadequate attention to events of the 1790s makes
certain later developments mystifying. The documentary ignores the religious history of the revolution
(including egalitarian liberalization, de-Christianization, and the Cult of the Supreme Being) and thus
ensures that viewers will not understand the significance of Napoleon's 1801 concordat with the papacy,
mentioned in passing.
What really saps the life out of this documentary is
the hackneyed, constricting format itself. A procession
of authoritative talking heads, talking authoritatively,
gives the viewer no reason to think. Why not pit one
head against another, or at least work to convey that
historical inquiry is a dialogue, inspired by questions?
The diverse assemblage of heads, twenty-one by my
count, is dominated by two military historians, John R.
Elting and Owen Connelly. Buttressing the documentary's over-emphasis on Bonaparte's personal life are
Sandra Gulland, the author of a trilogy of novels about
1572
Film Reviews
Josephine, and the Comtesse Hugues de Livonnière,
descended from Josephine. Jean Tulard, Alistair
Home, and Antoine de Baecque are welcome presences. But insufficient use is made of Isser Woloch,
who might have been allowed to convey that others
beside Bonaparte assisted in constructing the First
Empire.
To turn from Grubin's Napoleon to the miniseries
Napoléon, directed by Yves Simoneau from a script by
Didier Decoin, is something of a relief. One encounters a richer, fuller picture of Napoleonic Europe in
Simoneau's epic than in Grubin's documentary. In a
historical drama, political debates may be crystallized
into moments of interpersonal exchange; motivations
may be subtly speculated upon by the mere raising of
a character's eyebrow. One might stop short of recommending this miniseries for the classroom (except,
perhaps, as part of a course devoted specifically to
investigating the challenges of adapting history to the
screen). But it would certainly spur more interesting
discussion of Napoleon's personal and political ambiguities than would Grubin's documentary. The appropriately epic dimensions of Simoneau's cast ensure
that no viewer will fall into the trap of viewing the First
Empire as simply an extension of one man.
Napoléon is a French-British-Canadian production
with an international cast. Accents are a mishmash
(most remarkably, Napoleon and Josephine seem to
have traded French and Italian origins). But the
performances are strong, and some are splendid.
Christian Clavier makes a surprisingly acceptable Napoleon, once one succeeds in forgetting Astérix, the
other Gallic icon he has recently played. Isabella
Rossellini as Josephine is charming and savvy. Pushing
fifty during production, Clavier and Rossellini are
practically the age at which the emperor and empress
died; they look far too old (Clavier laughably so) in the
opening scenes of early flirtation. Blink and you miss a
prominent face: Julian Sands as a steely Count Metternich, Anouk Aimée as a steely Letizia Bonaparte.
Gerard Depardieu is Fouché. The star turn is by John
Malkovich, perfectly cast as a laconic Talleyrand.
As in the documentary, war and love (with a pinch of
diplomacy) prevail. But Decoin's script manages to
include important themes and moments missing from
Grubin's documentary. Napoleon's decision to kidnap
and execute the duc d'Enghien, a Bourbon prince—an
important development not even mentioned in the
documentary—is given center stage in the miniseries.
After a failed assassination attempt on Napoleon,
Talleyrand asks Bonaparte whether he would have
voted for the death of Louis XVI. (This is a nice way
of voicing a central question: was Napoleon the revolution's creature or its betrayer?) Napoleon says that
he does not know; now, Talleyrand replies, is his
moment to decide. Bonaparte orders the execution.
Simoneau treats Enghien's execution as a moment of
high drama: the camera pans smoothly between rifles,
Napoleon's face, and Enghien's (despite the fact that
the two men are separated by hundreds of miles), as if
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1573
they occupy the same dreamspace. A lock of hair cut
by Enghien for his fiancée will be echoed by a lock that
Napoleon cuts at the film's end for the young English
girl to whom he has told his life story—as if finally,
after years of confinement on St. Helena, he has
succeeded in paying the price for his crime. (The film
conflates two assassination attempts: the 1800 "infernal machine" and the 1804 Cadoudal plot: while the
former was admittedly more dramatic, it was the latter
that inspired the revenge on Enghien.)
Simoneau's film is stunningly visual, beginning with
the opening image of Napoleon's back as he surveys
the Atlantic from St. Helena (this quotes Benjamin
Robert Haydon's once-famous 1829 painting, Napoleon Musing at St. Helena). And when Bonaparte visits
Jacques-Louis David's studio to view the canvas of his
coronation and tells the painter to include his mother,
despite her absence from the ceremony itself, the
miniseries, in a stroke, leaps ahead of the documentary
by conveying that visual sources should be treated with
caution rather than viewed as simple windows onto the
past. Then, in a lovely touch, as the painter and the
emperor walk away, the camera remains on the canvas,
which becomes gradually saturated with color as,
off-screen, David's voice tells Napoleon how very long
such a work will take to finish.
STUART SEMMEL
University of Delaware
EXILE IN BUYUKADA. Written and directed by Turan
Yavuz. Produced by Ayda Yavuz. Turkey. In Russian,
French, and Turkish, with English narration and subtitles. 2002; color; 72 min. Distributed by Pathfinder
Home Entertainment.
In the eleven years following his expulsion from the
Soviet Union, the Bolshevik leader and Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) exposed the
crimes of Joseph Stalin through his writings, tried to
organize a worldwide current of opposition to capitalism and Stalinism alike, and lived with the dark
foreboding of his own eventual demise at Stalin's
machination. Exile in Buyukada is a plausible cinematic
evocation of Trotsky's time of persecution and frustration. A hybrid of documentary and drama based on
Isaac Deutscher's celebrated biography, The Prophet
Outcast (1963), and narrated enchantingly by English
actress Vanessa Redgrave, the film depicts Trotsky in
his Turkish exile. Its earliest shots show Trotsky standing on the deck of the ship Ilych (V. I. Lenin's middle
name) on a cold February day in 1929, heading from
Odessa to Constantinople. His wife Natalia Sedova is
at his side, white-capped waves roll below, and GPU
agents peer ominously from the stem.
Russian actor Victor Sergachev is a dead ringer for
Trotsky, albeit the Trotsky of 1940 rather than 1930.
His understated performance conveys well Trotsky's
brilliance, concentration, rigidity, and conviction. Sergachev surpasses the meager performances of Richard
Burton in The Assassination of Leon Trotsky (1972) and
DECEMBER 2003