COULD DOC SPORTELLO CONQUER EUROPE?
On Ridley Scott’s ‘Napoleon’
The first thing to notice about Bonaparte the warrior in this film is that he’s constantly out of breath. It’s been remarked that his presence at the beheading by guillotine of Marie Antoinette is an anachronism, but the huffing and puffing, deliberate and amplified by the sound design, are similarly out of time: Napoleon was in his twenties during the battle being reenacted, and being winded wouldn’t seem to be the characteristic to emphasize. But both anachronisms serve the same purpose: ambition set against a mounting sense of mortality. Not a surprise perhaps from an aging director and a middle-aged movie star. In a movie with so many cannons being pointed up and popped off (including gratuitously and erroneously, if amusingly, at the Pyramids of Giza), the phallic anxieties aren’t subtle.
