At the heart of these two rollicking war biopics about Charles de Gaulle’s monumental effort to save his country from the Nazis is a French struggle. Still raging, it invites France to think about its own collaboration with the Nazis.
My impressions of the French general are relatively scant. Was not his ungrateful resistance to Britain joining the Common Market an example of typically French anti-Britishness, as well as a betrayal of the country that saved him? And there was that speech at the Élysée Palace in 1967 in which De Gaulle described Jews as “elite people, domineering and sure of themselves” and of “burning and conquering ambition”.
Yet in director Antonin Baudry’s films Jews are the litmus test as to what kind of French person you are: the Vichy antisemitic collaborationists or the Free French lot established against the odds by the proud yet powerless De Gaulle, a superbly brittle yet humane Simon Abkarian playing the lone French voice rallying pride and resistance to the Germans. I am not so sure French antisemitism divides so neatly along these lines.
Still, here the Free French have a brave, Jewish resistance fighter Livia played by Anamaria Vartolomei. Her plots against the Nazi invaders in Paris form one of the subplots to the main action in London where the General and Churchill (Simon Russell Beale) have a series of tetchy meetings. Here Beale’s increasingly convincing performance sees Churchill deploy his excellent French with an uncompromisingly English accent.
Meanwhile, Baudry shows De Gaulle as a lonely figure in London. His greatest enemy is not the Nazis but the ridicule of his allies and fellow French as he tries to gather support for the soul of his country.
Each film is a hefty two and a half hours or more. Yet Baudry’s screenplay, which is co-written with Julian T. Jackson and Bérénice Vila, has the pace of thriller. The action toggles between the political machinations of De Gaulle and his fake-it-‘till-you-make-it strategy and thrilling action sequences as his most loyal soldier Leclerc leads his small army into battle in Africa.
The Battle of Bir Hakeim in which 3,000 Free French soldiers fight off ten times that number of German and Italian soldiers under Rommel’s command, allowing the British 8th Army to regroup, is one of many pulse- pounding confrontations in the films.
Ultimately De Gaulle comes out as a pig-headed hero who wins Churchill’s respect and refuses to submit to Roosevelt. But just as interesting is the willingness of the films, which have become major box office hits in France, to tackle the taboo subject of French collaboration.
Now that the second film has been released I recommend seeing the movies close together like two gripping episodes of one epic.
De Gaulle: Résistance/Liberté
Certificate 15
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