To the laments of military historians about the accuracy of Ridley Scott’s film Napoleon, one could add some about the architecture. Christopher Wren’s Royal Naval College in Greenwich gets digitally spliced with classical architecture from France and Malta, so they all look as if they are in the same place, while Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire gets to represent both Paris and Moscow.
But such complaints miss the point. The film is entertainment – to expect factual precision is like going to Macbeth for an informative lecture on Scottish history. And, as in any lavishly produced period drama, there’s a problem with the fourth wall: even if the costumes and settings and turns of phrase were completely of their time, such authenticity would still jar with the awareness that it’s recorded with state-of-the-art, 21st-century technology.
Objections could be more usefully directed at the film’s lifeless dialogue, the lack of depth or development in the characters, the neck-cricking pace with which momentous events are handled (Borodino in about a minute) and some pointless addenda (Napoleon both witnesses the execution of Marie-Antoinette and meets a mummified pharaoh). When it comes to dramatic quality, unfortunately, my analogy with Shakespeare’s play no longer applies.
Billionaire of little brain
I’m prepared to believe that Elon Musk has business skills that I don’t have, which is why he’s richer than I am. And that Jacob Rees-Mogg had some knowledge of investment banking that helped him acquire his considerable wealth. But are these people really such geniuses as to be respectively worth $223bn and more than £100m?
It’s a feature of contemporary life that a bit of acumen gets grotesquely over-rewarded, which makes the beneficiaries feel much smarter than they are, and so entitled to impose their terrible ideas on other people. See also Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, both wealthy beyond their apparent talents. Or indeed the many people of my generation who, having been lucky enough to buy homes at the dawn of an age of house price inflation, are over-inclined to attribute their fortuitous wealth to their own brilliance.
Watching Musk last week, as he told former advertisers on X to “go fuck yourselves”, was another reminder of the tenuous connection between money and brains.
Testicle reprieved?
I have mixed feelings about City Hall, the Norman Foster-designed building that from 2002 to 2021 was the seat of London’s mayor and the Greater London Authority. Having witnessed the flawed process by which it was designed, I know what went into this particular sausage.
It was going to be a bland, speculative office block, until it was belatedly decided that the seat of London’s democratic government should in some way be “iconic”. Its design acquired the strange ovoid shape that prompted Ken Livingstone to call it a “glass testicle” and an internal spiral ramp above the debating chamber. This was meant to give the public both inspiring views of their city and the ability to look down on their representatives, as Foster had achieved at the Reichstag in Berlin, but here fell foul of security concerns and never worked as intended.
When the Twentieth Century Society started campaigning for the building’s preservation, I found it hard to be passionate in its defence. But it is definitely a distinctive work of its time and a piece of London’s history. So it’s good news that a plan has been announced to keep it, with a design by the architects Gensler that would replace that flawed ramp with leafy terraces, and soften its somewhat glum flanks with greenery.
• Rowan Moore is the Observer’s architecture critic
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