In the Palace Electric this weekend, a film with a boring title about a dead, straightlaced politician who once led a distant country is playing. The film is in French with subtitles. It's quite long. Go and see it.
Despite my down-beat sales pitch, De Gaulle: Résistance is gripping. It's a great drama about the man himself, of course, but there's also a side story about a lad who is inspired by de Gaulle's wartime broadcasts from London, and who is then caught up in the resistance to Hitler's many collaborators in Vichy France.
In this sub-plot, there is a will-they-won't-they love interest. The film is not a dry, historical drama. Parts are weepy romance - and that, in my moist eyes, is just fine.
But above all, the film will make you feel better about politicians, and you may need that restorative feeling at the moment.
It's not in the film but when Charles de Gaulle became president of France after the war, he installed an electricity meter in the Elysee presidential palace so that his own consumption would not be paid for by the taxpayer. In our sometimes squalid times, we should take off a chapeau to that.
I suppose that a public service town needs no reminding of the importance of public service - but approval and confirmation is still nice to have.
The film is in two parts and only the first, De Gaulle: Résistance, is playing at the moment. It is about de Gaulle's time in London, and his testy relationship with Churchill (starring the French actor Simon Abkarian as de Gaulle and Simon Russell Beale brilliantly as the British leader). In their exchanges, you will see some of the finest acting you'll see on any screen.
It makes The Odyssey, by the way, seem like a crass bungle of clumsy words and ham acting - and that's because it is. Unlike The Odyssey, De Gaulle: Résistance never flags despite its two hours and 40 minutes.
And it leaves you - or, at least, left me - thinking about our times, and about duty and service.
Here was a political leader who had known war. Charles de Gaulle was wounded and taken prisoner in the First World War. In 1940, he led an armoured division in combat against invading German tanks.
So when de Gaulle talked of war, he knew the horrors of which he spake (compare and contrast with the president of the United States who somehow avoided military service in Vietnam, and who then had the shameless temerity to turn on Senator John McCain who was captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese, turning down an early release despite his pain. "He's not a war hero," Mr Trump said, adding, "I like people that weren't captured, okay?")
But I digress. De Gaulle: Résistance is an epic story of two leaders who butted up against each other nose-to-nose (literally in one scene) but who respected each other in their towering sense of duty. Both could have taken easier ways out but chose the tough course instead, a course which, had it gone the wrong way, would have seen them shot, with or without torture.
It's a film about tough choices, about grasping nettles, about sacrifice. To some extent, it's a film about necessary duplicity: Churchill keeps de Gaulle in the dark; de Gaulle outwits Churchill (and Roosevelt).
Above all, it's a film about defiance. It's a film about standing up and doing the right thing - and we need that inspiration at the moment.
When France capitulated to the Nazis, de Gaulle fled to London and exhorted his fellow citizens to continue the fight. On June 18 and June 22, 1940, he broadcast on the BBC to the occupied country as its "leaders" who were cosying up to the Nazis prepared their inglorious accommodation with the occupiers.
Those broadcasts were captured movingly in the film, with the straight-backed general enunciating his message with an iron certainty.
"The destiny of the world is here. I, General de Gaulle, currently in London, invite the officers and the French soldiers who are located in British territory or who would come there, with their weapons or without their weapons, I invite the engineers and the special workers of armament industries who are located in British territory or who would come there, to put themselves in contact with me."
And he ended: "Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished."
The film raises questions about what our duties are when democracy is under threat. How much should we kowtow to a despot? How much pain should we take instead of staying schtum for a quiet life?
It's a film for our times. Go and see it. Feel better after it. Feel different.
