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”.
