Own Gaulle

NICK WRIGHT laments the one-sided telling of French history in an otherwise entertaining spectacle

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DE GAULLE is a two-part French film directed by Antonin Baudry, co-written by Berenice Vila, drawing on A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle by British historian Julian Jackson.

The second part, in French La Bataille de Gaulle, continues with Simon Abkarian as de Gaulle playing a delightfully diplomatic and conflicted courtship with Simon Russell Beale’s Churchill.

Both parts work as highly watchable war films of the traditional kind, but with subtle politics and several engaging plot lines.

The colonialist mindset of both leaders is artfully played against an arch-imperialist Roosevelt who, deploying charm and power, tries to ensure that US money and firepower shape events, including the imposition of a continuing Vichy administration in French colonies, designed to marginalise de Gaulle.

A romantic story line that leads to the role of Jean Moulin being depicted as almost the exclusive architect of a French resistance movement — which is seen, essentially, as a Gaullist enterprise — makes these films present-day propaganda for a particular reading of French history.

The battle scenes are well done and bring out the heroic character of the Free French forces, most especially in the depiction of the battle of Bir Hakeim, when the Free French covered the 1942 retreat of the British in north Africa.

The one-sided depiction of the war as an affair set in Europe and Africa allows for a dramatic intensity, but at the expense of historical accuracy or any depiction of the decisive fighting on the Eastern Front.

This engaging depiction of the critical role that de Gaulle played by standing for an intransigent France against Vichy collaborators doesn’t allow for the critically important military role played by the combatants, and saboteurs, of the communist-led Franc-Tireurs et Partisans (FTP), or of the pioneering role of the PCF in forming the popular front of resistants that laid the basis for a post-war government of patriotic forces.

As such, the film functions as an intervention in the contemporary French national conversation about its government and state that resolutely depicts one side of the story — but powerfully played and with great humour.

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