Ever since I watched his 1977 science fiction horror film, Alien, and the 1982 Blade Runner that changed the way ‘the future’ looks to us, I’ve been a Scott bhakt. Napoleon, in the 2 min 30 sec trailer, looked compelling, epic, and what cinema of this kind should be: grand. I can’t wait till November to see it in a hall. But what has captivated me, beguiled me even, is the ‘theatrical release poster’ of the movie.
The poster shows a close-up of the man whose name the film bears. But at a more striking, fundamental level, the high-contrast chiaroscuro image, as if a detail from a Jacques-Louis David painting, is of the man who plays the role of Napoleon Bonaparte: Joaquin Phoenix.
You almost miss out the actual face under the shadow cast by the bicorne – the two-cornered hat worn by Napoleonic generals and staff officers, Napo included. As Phoenix/Bonaparte stares directly at us, wearing a scowl that would be as much at home on the face of Johnny Rotten as on one of the great, convulsive figures in history, you realise that like a pair of eyes instinctively descending as if by heavy gravity on an exposed cleavage, your sight fixes on one singular part of the face on the poster: the cleft lip.
A cleft lip – I hear that ‘hare-lip’ has become an offensive term – is an opening or split in the upper lip that forms when developing facial structures in an unborn infant don’t completely close. It is a ‘defect’. On Phoenix, most of us saw it first when we first saw him in Scott’s 2000 film Gladiator, as Roman emperor Commodus. Clearly, Scott has riffed with the gold laurel wreath crown worn by Phoenix-Commodus in the self-coronation of Phoenix-Bonaparte scene momentarily shown in Napoleon’s trailer. But it is the cleft lip that holds our gaze. It is the idee fixe, what the French philosopher Roland Barthes would call the ‘punctum’ – puncture – in a photographic image.
Phoenix as Napoleon is Napoleon as Phoenix, as his/their cleft lip, dropping like a sheer cliff face from below his left nostril, fuses the two entities into one. It gives the face and its First Consul stare its brutal power. The historical Napoleon, of course, was not ‘Scarface’. Andrew Roberts, in his magisterial 2014 biography, Napoleon: A Life, describes the young soldier-officer Napo being described by a woman as ‘the thinnest and queerest being I ever met… so thin that he inspired pity’. That look underwent a drastic change after he put down a district revolt in 1795 as second-in-command of the Army of the Interior in Republican France and gained self-confidence as a leader of men: ‘His emaciated thinness was converted into a fullness of face, and his complexion, which had been yellow and apparently unhealthy, became clear and comparatively fresh; his features, which were angular and sharp, became round and filled out,’ Roberts quotes Laure d’Abrantes, the Shobhaa De of that era in France. From the trailer, we see both Napoleons. From the poster, we see Phoenix and the younger, steelier French general hungry to rise up the ranks, the world, in life.
Of course, history, unlike historians, cares little about silly things like historical accuracy. It’s focused on the big things like mythologising and demonising. Like the likes of Byron, Napoleon was as obsessed about self-imaging as a selfie-addicted teen is today. Portraiture has enhanced the ‘noble’ qualities and suppressed the ‘weak’ ones of great personalities (the opposite if depicting ‘enemies’) since the beginning of reproductive imaging. Strong leaders obsess about it. But portrayals in cinema are also about creating enduring portraits, especially of those who existed in the pre-photographic era.
So, Cleopatra is Elizabeth Taylor to us. Alauddin Khilji is Ranveer Singh. And Joaquin Phoenix’s cleft-lip may well be everything Napoleonic.
