You sure as hell wouldn’t call it a pearl, either. “The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” No one would accuse Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s two-and-a-half-hour epic (that’s the theatrical cut’s running time, mind you there’s a four-hour version waiting in the wings as well) about the French dictator’s rise and fall, of being thinly veiled autofiction in period dress. “All art is autobiographical,” Federico Fellini once said.
