You can guess from the title that this is a biopic of
the famed French apothecary Michel de Nostredame
(Nostradamus). A very close contemporary of England's
Henry VIII, Michel was a renegade scientist from a
converted Jewish family who managed to live into his
sixties by staying out of the way of both the
Inquisition and the plague. He was expelled from
medical school, but was often called Dr, and was
assumed to be a physician even though he would be more
accurately described as a pharmacist. (The lines
between those professions were not drawn so clearly in
those days.) More important to those of us who live
550 years later, he became supremely famous as a seer
whose mystical verses may have accurately predicted
the critical developments of the succeeding centuries
in some detail. Or so they claim.
Of course the people who voice such a claim have
really had to cobble the mystical ramblings of Nostro
to suit historical events, because it's never really
very clear what sooths he was actually saying. His
verses are cryptic and ambiguous. Given enough effort
and plenty of latitude in our interpretation, we can
make Nostradamus's verses mean whatever we want them
to mean. Needless to say, the big problem with
Nostro's reputation as a clairvoyant is that he only
seems to work in reverse. People in our time look at
his cryptic verses, cobble them to suit our needs, and
conclude that he predicted such catastrophic
developments as the world wars in the 20th century,
and even the fall of the twin towers on 9/11. To my
knowledge there is not a single case in all these
centuries where anyone has deciphered Nostro's
ambiguous ramblings and actually used them to forecast
something yet to come.
Let's face it, anybody can predict the past.
Shakespeare was born during Nostradamus's lifetime,
and I'd be willing to bet that if I spend enough time
on Shakespeare's works, and apply the same liberal
standards of interpretation which have been applied to
Nostro's, I can probably make a case that ol' Billy
was actually the Prophet of Avon.
So, you might wonder, if Nostradamus never really
predicted anything concretely and accurately, how did
he ever become famous as a prophet in the first place?
It's because France's queen Catherine de Medici, a
famous patron of the arts, was a fan. She was
fascinated with astrology and read Nostro's almanacs.
When one of Nostradamus's books hinted vaguely at
unspecified threats to the royal family, Catherine
summoned him to the court to explain himself, and she
ended up in his thrall. When Catherine's husband was
killed in a jousting contest, she became convinced
that this was the very threat Nostradamus had
foreseen. A star was born! Catherine made Nostradamus
the personal physician and tutor of her oldest son,
the next king.
I reckon that train of logic wasn't convincing enough
for the author of this screenplay, because he
embellished Nostradamus's accuracy to a point where it
would pass our modern standards for the fulfillment of
miraculous predictions, as opposed to simply
impressing a credulous queen from an era when a flat
earth stood in the center of the universe and medicine
consisted mostly of blood-letting. As the movie spins
the yarn, Nostro's prediction was so specific that the
French king's mistress went out onto the jousting
field and begged her lover not to take a third pass at
his opponent, for that is presisely when Nostro said
death would come.
And it then did.
If that had really happened, even I would be a
believer.
The director of the film wasn't satisfied merely to
present such a specific prophecy fulfilled. He
actually showed us the event transpiring in Nostro's
mind, then pictured the prophet writing it down, then
pictured the event happening exactly as Nostro had
seen it! (And saving money in the process by using the
same footage twice.)
According to the film, that isn't all Nostro could
see. Freed from the ambiguity required by his verses,
he confessed to friends and family that he saw the
problems of the 20th century in detail, and his
"imaginings" were actual newsreel footage of Hitler's
speeches, atomic bomb explosions, the JFK
assassination, Nazis, panzers, and other calamitous
modern developments. (He seems surprised and
frightened by the swastika symbol, although en
educated man of his time would probably have seen it
used in both religious and secular imagery, and would
have considered it benign.)
Man, those were some specific visions! Nostro even
foresaw Jackie Kennedy's pillbox hat. (I didn't make
that up.)
I'm not sure this was the right way to go with this
film. I think it would have worked much better if the
filmmakers had tried to show the cultural and
psychological conditions that caused people to believe
that Nostradamus was a seer, as opposed to assuming
that his reputation was simply the acknowledgement of
genuine clairvoyance.
But I'll say this. If the filmmaker genuinely thought
that the right approach was to assume that Nostradamus
really was a prophet, he needed to make a much more
vivid and sensational film than this one. This film is
paced very slowly, and Nostro (Tcheky Karyo) delivers
every line in the measured, emotionless tone of a
scientist describing some obscure phenomenon to
laymen. To make it worse, he does that with a French
accent so thick that I wasn't always sure which
English words he was trying to say.
