De Gaulle: Résistance – a ‘gallopingly eventful’ biopic

The British and Americans have been making big-budget films about the Second World War for decades, said Ed Potton in The Times but, “Gallic cinematic triumphalism has been more muted”. So “bravo” to Antonin Baudry for producing this “entertaining, and sometimes moving portrait, of Charles de Gaulle”.

The first part of a two-part epic (the second comes out later this month), it is focused on his flight to London in 1940, and the founding of his Free France movement, and culminates in a lavish recreation of the Battle of Bir Hakeim. Simon Abkarian plays the general, steering a “delicate path between pathos, comedy and dignity”; Simon Russell Beale once again takes the role of Winston Churchill (speaking mainly in French).

Perhaps because its source is a biography by a British historian – Julian Jackson – “this very enjoyable and gallopingly eventful” biopic has an “element of amused detachment”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. It is naturally sympathetic to the “lofty” and faintly preposterous general who refused to accept the dishonour of Vichy France’s capitulation to the Nazis; Churchill, his great supporter and, in some ways, creator, found him exasperating but also saw in him a kindred spirit, “a romantic maverick and patriot”.

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For reasons that become clear, the film’s narrative is split between de Gaulle and the resistance fighter Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle. This “lumbers” the film with another story to tell, and leaves less time to explore de Gaulle’s “strange, dislocated life in wartime London”, said Phil de Semlyen on Time Out. As a result, the future president remains an elusive figure. Hopefully, part two will focus more on the man, and less on the myth.