Star rating: ****
Director: Antoine de Caunes
Cast: Philippe Torreton, Roschdy Zem, Elsa Zylberstein
Running time: 120 min
Age restriction: 10
The first French feature film shot entirely in South Africa opens today as part of the French Film Festival.
Monsieur N is part history lesson, part detective story. Based on the documented facts of the last six years of Napoleon Bonaparte's life, it tells the story of his complicated relationship with his British guards.
Bonaparte was exiled to St Helena in 1815 and died in 1821, but conspiracy theorists question what really what happened.
There are several theories. Maybe the British poisoned him as it was costing them a fortune to keep him imprisoned. Or someone in his inner circle who did him in for money or to get off the island with dignity intact?
Then there's the school that says it is not Bonaparte's body that is interred at Les Invalides in Paris but that of his valet, and rumoured half-brother, Cipriani. Could he have escaped from the island at the time of his reported death and spent the rest of his life elsewhere?
The movie is scripted in such a way that you can choose to believe whatever you want.
Though most of the characters in it really did exist, the lieutenant telling the story, Basil Heathcote (Jay Rodan), did not.
He tells the story as scenes jump back and forth between the return of Bonaparte's remains to Paris in 1840 and his stay on the island.
When Heathcote watches the funeral cortege go past, he thinks back to events on the island. Heathcote was Bonaparte's shadow for almost five years, but realises that he may not really have understood what was happening.
Richard E Grant makes an excellent governor of the island, Hudson Lowe. He is super-cilious, humourless and the stereotypical British officer. He doesn't so much voice his displeasure as stare it down his nose.
He follows his orders, leaving no room for imagination and therefore no room for the possibility that he might not have considered all the possibilities.
Lowe does not get along with his prisoner, who certainly has no respect for his warder.
Bonaparte (Philippe Torreton) does not think of himself as a prisoner and his inner circle, the French military aristocracy that followed him to the island, don't treat him as one.
He is addressed as His Majesty, and refuses to answer to the only title the British will allow him, that of general. He is the epitome of imperial arrogance with everyone, even his in-crowd.
But in private, with his valet Cipriani (Bruno Putzulu) and with Betsy (Siobhan Hewlett) you catch a glimpse of a tired man who wants to be free of the trappings of the great military strategist and exiled leader.
His so-called friends, the inner circle, are a bitchy lot, fighting over his bequest even before he shows any signs of dying.
The production team made sure the costumes and sets are authentic which certainly adds to the feel of a beautifully made movie. About half of the movie is in French with subtitles and the rest in English.
Capetonians will let out a snigger here and there when they recognise a familiar building. Most of the movie was shot in and around Hermanus and Cape Town. The governor's residence will be suspiciously familiar, as will the harbour, and Table Mountain in the background of the St Helena market is a dead give away.
When faced with reality your imagination tends to want to make up something better than what really happened.
Bonaparte says something to that effect in this movie and that's what movie is about. Faced with a perfectly acceptable version of reality, the story-teller in us wants to retell the tale to sound bigger and better - which this movie certainly is.