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French critics considered Ridley Scott’s new biopic lazy, pointless, boring, migraine-inducing, too short and historically inaccurate. And that’s just to start.
Reporting from Paris
The French do not like an Englishman’s rendition of Napoleon.
Or at least, the French critics do not.
Looking grim and moody from under an enormous bicorn hat, Joaquin Phoenix glowers from posters around Paris, promoting the film by Ridley Scott that offers the latest reincarnation of the French hero whose nose — as one reviewer deliciously wrote — still rises in the middle of French political life two centuries after his death.
Yet while British and American reviewers glowed, French critics considered it lazy, pointless, boring, migraine-inducing, too short and historically inaccurate. And that’s just to start.
The critic for the left-wing daily Libération panned the film as not just ugly, but vacuous, positing nothing and “very sure of its inanity.” The review in Le Monde offered that if the director’s vision had one merit, it was “simplicity” — “a montage alternating between Napoleon’s love life and his feats of battle.”
The right-wing Le Figaro took many positions in its breathless coverage, using the moment to pump out a 132-page special-edition magazine on Napoleon, along with more than a dozen articles, including a reader poll and a Napoleon knowledge test. The newspaper’s most memorable take came from Thierry Lentz, the director of the Napoleon Foundation, a charity dedicated to historical research: He considered Phoenix’s version of Napoleon — compared to more than 100 other actors who have played the role — “a bit vulgar, a bit rude, with a voice from elsewhere that doesn’t fit at all.”
All of this was to be expected.
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