Perhaps because it is based on a biography by an Englishman – Julian Jackson’s A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle – this very enjoyable and gallopingly eventful biopic, directed by Antonin Baudry, has an element of amused detachment. The first of two parts, it offers a good-humoured, though naturally sympathetic, perspective on France’s great wartime hero, played with martyred and faintly preposterous hauteur by Franco-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian. De Gaulle is the lofty exile in London, refusing to accept the dishonour of the Vichy government and its capitulation to the Nazis, symbolised by Marshal Philippe Pétain (Alain Libolt) and Adm François Darlan (Mathieu Kassovitz).
For reasons that will later become clear, De Gaulle’s own story is mysteriously intertwined with that of a hothead young patriot, Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle (Florian Lesieur), who is De Gaulle’s biggest fan. A tiny touch of comedy is part of what makes this resemble an old-fashioned 60s war film, although it has evidently taken until 2026 for French cinema to come to terms with its contentious national icon. No one here is cheeky enough to comment on the nominative determinism of a Gallic hero being called “De Gaulle”.
His great supporter (and even, in some ways, creator) after the fall of France in 1940 is Winston Churchill, played with great gusto and charm by Simon Russell Beale – incidentally, it is a relief to see a commercial movie role worthy of the man. I can’t think of any other film portrayal of Churchill in which most of his dialogue is in French; this is how he mostly talks with De Gaulle. Was Churchill’s French really as good as that?
Churchill’s attitude is exasperated, affectionate and occasionally furious, but he recognises in De Gaulle a kindred spirit: a romantic maverick and patriot. Beale gives his extended dialogue scenes with Abkarian, genially quaffing champagne, a touch of Shakespeare. I wonder if the second film will include the legendary moment when De Gaulle is asked who the three most important Europeans are, and promptly replies: “Dante, Goethe, Chateaubriand.” When asked about Shakespeare, he shrugs: “European?” The film also breathlessly gives us De Gaulle’s arrival in Britain after the French collapse, where he is cunningly promoted by Churchill as the true keeper of the French flame to undermine Vichy.
He is given staff, a house and permitted to make BBC broadcasts rallying the cause of French resistance, for all of which De Gaulle is hilariously ungrateful. He then assembles a ragtag group of expatriates as his cabinet, like the prisoners in John Sturges’s The Great Escape joining the great plan. De Gaulle impassively accepts the horror of Churchill’s ruthless bombing of the French fleet at the Algerian port of Mers-el-Kébir in 1940, killing nearly 1,300 French servicemen, to prevent this force falling into Nazi hands.
The film suggests that De Gaulle, with a ruthless realpolitik of his own, saw the importance of propitiating Churchill, while seeing Mers-el-Kébir as a judgment on Vichy cowardice. Then, we get the high comedy of De Gaulle’s chaotic personal adventures in Africa, finding support for his Free French in Chad and Cameroon, which Churchill admires as audacious if absurd. An Anglo-Hollywood movie might have seen Britain’s turning point in the war as a matter of dramatising Montgomery’s brilliance at El-Alamein.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
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