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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3499 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 24, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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There is some minor diversity like some of the senior officers and ladies maids improbably being black, but I didn’t think it was really a ‘woke’ picture.

I don't think that was particularly unlikely at all, France had a number of black mixed race people in it, including in the upper class. For example the famous author Alexandre Dumas' father was mixed race and a French general.

Personally I didn't like the movie, it really did feel like it made a buffoon out of Napoleon, who got cuckolded and is very insecure about his success. I would've preferred that it either double down on being a period piece romcom, or to have been properly about Napoleon's battles and conquests, instead of being a weird romance interspersed with battle scenes.

Thomas-Alexandre was briefly shown in the film as I remember, but I think the actor was full blooded African rather than biracial, which would have been more accurate.

Josephine's maid was also afro-Caribbean, which is plausible since she grew up on Martinique.

But yeah, there were a few other Africans that were thrown in awkwardly. My suspicion is that Scott did the absolute bare minimum to keep the diversity-mongers happy, which is all we can expect from him I guess.

Incidentally, Oppenheimer has a similar 'bare minimum' moment where the camera lingers on the face of an African woman inexplicably attending a 1930s physics class in the Netherlands before never showing her again.

I agree, in this case though Napoleon teaches a handful of young British naval officers while a captive after Waterloo, one of whom is a black man, which seems somewhat less likely.

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