Run time: 158 mins

(Subtitled)

Language: French

PART 1

This loud and proud biographical drama, about the exiled wartime leader and later French president Charles de Gaulle, goes big whenever the opportunity arises.

Adapted from Julian T Jackson’s 2018 biography ‘A Certain idea of France’, the film is about how the French President-to-be (played by Simon Abkarian) 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 (Simon Russell Beale and Campbell Scott) into taking on the collaborating Vichyists and their hated figurehead, Admiral Darlan (Mathieu Kassovitz).

A subplot involving the politicisation of young French resistance fighters reminds us that the war was also being fought on the domestic, civilian front, and it allows the film to reference, briefly, the plight of Jews in France. De Gaulle is distinctly old-fashioned and unsubtle – and often brash and overbearing – but it has strengths as an uncomplicated historical spectacle.