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If he hadn’t been France’s defining 20th century statesman, Charles de Gaulle might have made a great comedy straight man. Played by a ramrod straight and poker-faced Simon Abkarian in the first instalment of this two-part, bilingual French epic, he carries the air of a man who knows that, yes, that ladder is about to crash to the ground and someone is getting covered in paint.
For the majority of writer-director Antonin Baudry’s (The Wolf’s Call) stirring and big-scale biopic, it looks likely to be an exasperated Winston Churchill on the end of such a pratfall. As both friend and, at least in a political sense, foe to the exiled leader of the Free French government, Churchill (Simon Russell Beale returning to his Operation Mincemeat role) puffs his cheeks at de Gaulle’s gumption in trying to steer his foreign policy decisions. The pair’s fiery face-offs are a rollicking highlight of a film that occasionally feels stilted and orthodox.
Adapted from Julian T Jackson’s 900-page 2018 biography 'A Certain idea of France', De Gaulle: Résistance is about how the French President-to-be worked himself up through the cracks of history. He’s a captivating and paradoxical figure: a home-front soldier and an unelected democrat who conjures an unofficial mandate for himself through bulldozing force of will and an unwavering belief in himself and his country. He speaks of France in spiritual terms as he tries to coax Churchill and Roosevelt (Campbell Scott) into taking on the collaborating Vichyists and their hated figurehead, Admiral Darlan (Mathieu Kassovitz).
De Gaulle is a captivating and paradoxical figure
Lenin’s quote about ‘weeks where decades happen’ applies double to the two years – 1940-1942 – covered here. Baudry splits the narrative between de Gaulle and a real-life anti-Vichy resistance fighter, Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle (Florian Lesieur), which lumbers Résistance with another story to tell. This means fewer explosive encounters with Churchill and less time to explore his strange, dislocated life in wartime London. We meet his wife and their daughter with Down’s syndrome, but the man beneath the kepi remains an elusive figure. (Oddly, the one historical liberty taken has de Gaulle browbeating his (fictional) Polish plumber Blazej (Karim Leklou) into becoming his aide-de-camp, a quirky touch that adds a touch of absurdism to this nascent band of Free Frenchmen.)
Benoît Magimel and Niels Schneider pop up as De Gaulle’s battlefield leaders, as Résistance displays the derring-do of the Free French in the North African desert. A big-budget recreation of the lesser-known, but entirely heroic Battle of Bir Hakeim – think The Alamo with more berets – is a thunderous epilogue to a part one. Hopefully, the concluding part will zero in more on the man and less on the myth.
De Gaulle: Résistance premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.