It’s not hard to imagine a film where a young lad, growing up in the north, sits in his history class, listening to the teacher talk about the megalomaniac traits of Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose name, for generations, was synonymous with an idea of military prowess as well as being an existential threat to the British way of life. The man who apparently belittled Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. And this lad, rather than complying with his teacher’s derisory, arrogant attitude towards the Emperor, that curious arrogance beloved of history teachers, those who analyse the world rather than shape it, actually feels inspired by the short Corsican’s story. He thinks: one day, I too will be a kind of Napoleon. And as the lad grew, and took his place in the world, he did, indeed, become a kind of Napoleon. A general capable of summoning armies, making them march to his beat, creating a legacy which would give him the power to indulge his most outlandish whims and convert them into spectacles which cost more than anyone in the north in the fifties could ever have imagined. He was, and is, his own brand of Napoleon, and now, with the light of evening beckoning, it was time to finally pay homage to that figure that had inspired him in the classroom all those years ago, a man whose name could be uttered in the same breath as Alexander the Great, a ruthless imposer of order, a doomed lover, a tyrant to some and a hero to others.
And had this film been made, by Lynn Ramsey or the late Terrence Davis, for example, the only British directors who spring to mind who might have conceived and convinced others of their vision, then it would possibly have been a far more insightful film about power and ambition than the one the lad ended up making.
