Film review: De Gaulle: Tilting Iron

As part of a few days in Tours, I not only visited the Musée des Blindés in Saumur (well worth a visit; like in the Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace in Le Bourget, all the weird things the French ever built are well represented), but I also managed to catch the first half of the new De Gaulle biopic in the cinema, as it had just come out that weekend.

These films, called “La Bataille De Gaulle” in French, cover the period from 1940 to 1944 when De Gaulle was in charge of the Free French, despite attempts of just about everyone on the Anglo-American side to have him replaced by, well, just about everyone else. The first part clocks in at well over two hours and covers the period of 1940-1942.

I’d expected two hours of Frenchwashing, and I wasn’t disappointed. Despite (or maybe because of) this, I think the film is actually not a bad introduction to the history of the Free French, if you don’t take things too seriously. I even learned something about the demonstration of November 11, 1940 (link in French); I thought the film had made that up, but it actually happened! Apart from that, all the classics are there: we start the film with De Gaulle as commander of the 4th Armoured Reserve Division, personally ensuring the destruction of a German tank in his staff car at the Battle of Montcornet, then we have the Attack on Mers-el-Kébir, the rallying of Chad and French Cameroon, the Battle of Dakar, the Battle of Bir Hakeim and finally Operation Torch and its immediate aftermath. The only major historical event  missing from the film is the Syria-Lebanon campaign, which is a shame, because a) it showed that the Vichy French troops had quite a bit of fight left in them and b) it was the only occasion where the Free French actually fought the Vichy French. The latter is the reason it was left out, I suspect, because the film’s version of De Gaulle does put quite a lot of stress on the fact that “The French do not fight the French!”

There are two intertwined storylines in the film; one following De Gaulle in London, as he sets up the Free French organisation in the face of opposition from more or less everyone, and one following a certain Fernand, a college student in Paris, who gets more and more frustrated with the German occupation and eventually escapes to Algiers to witness the Allied landings and…well, I won’t say too much, but I will say that I kicked myself when I realised who this Fernand actually was.

Let’s also say that none of the actors are going to win any awards for this movie, and I think that’s also the point – De Gaulle is portrayed as a larger-than-life figure, who is just there to bang his fist on various desks in London and shout that “I am France!”, and stare moodily out of various windows when nobody seems to understand this; Churchill is played almost as a caricature by Simon Russell Beale, and various well-known French actors portray historical figures such as Darlan, Leclerc, Pleven, Koenig, Giraud, Muselier, Pétain and what have you, without showing many more emotions than the pride of righteous Frenchmen (yes, even the Vichy ones).

All in all, I enjoyed myself a lot- the film has a couple of pretty good battle sequences (Bir Hakeim especially, I thought; sadly the Montcornet sequence, which I was really looking forward to, was a bit short)  and it’s good fun trying to reconcile actual history with the way the film is portraying things (on the whole not too badly, I thought, obviously they had to simplify and Frenchify things a bit, but I don’t think they violate history too much).

Sadly, I don’t think the second part is going to make it to Munich, so I may have to wait for a release on streaming; if either of the parts does show up in a cinema near you, I think you could do worse than to buy a ticket and watch the film, if only to get an idea of how Churchill must have felt dealing with those annoying French…