Austerlitz (1960) - film review

When the English renege on a peace treaty with France, the French general Napoléon Bonaparte has no recourse but to pursue a bitter war against England and her allies.  Political conspiracies are rife and Napoléon brings forward his planned coronation to secure his position.  Yet he needs one more great military victory to secure his future and enable him to realise his ambitions for France.  The battle of Austerlitz offers him the opportunity he seeks…

Over forty years after making his landmark epic Napoléon , Abel Gance returns to the life of France’s most famous general in this lavish production which focuses on one comparatively short but decisive point in his life.

Whilst Austerlitz is visually impressive, with great attention to period detail, and is historically about as accurate as a film can be, it is sorely deficient as a work of cinema.  The very things which made Gance’s earlier film Napoléon such a monumental masterpiece – the photography, the scale, the drama – appear almost to have been forgotten in this film.  Instead, the film is a relentless barrage of dry dialogue, from the first scene to the last, with a brief respite during the battle scene itself.

This is not to say that this is a bad film and that it does not merit serious critical attention. Pierre Mondy’s Napoléon is an intriguing, multi-layered character, a great intellect marred by bursts of childish petulance.  The film gives a detailed analysis of the battle which shows the extent of Napoléon’s cunning, and also his vanity.   The difficulty is that all this scholarly detail robs the film of any real sense of drama and humanity, so that watching it is rather like reading a very dull historical tome.

The film is also marred by Gance’s flawed attempts to represent the battle as fully and accurately as possible.  The inter-cutting of studio and location scenes of the battle are painfully evident and undermine the affect Gance was trying to achieve.   Also, unlike Gance’s Napoléon of the 1920s, this film’s very obvious attempt to end with a triumphant rallying cry for the French nation falls flat, a disappointing end to a disappointing film.

© James Travers 2000

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