De Gaulle: Résistance

The first of a two-part biopic of Charles de Gaulle’s efforts leading the French Resistance, with a title like De Gaulle: Résistance it comes as no surprise that Antonin Baudry’s film lionizes the arguably most understudied of the major WWII leaders. The most expensive production to come out of France this year lasts an arduous two hours and 40 minutes, just one minute longer than Part Two. The result is that this is certainly the biggest the French Resistance has ever looked, even if it is simplified into one-noted nationalism rather than a symphony of ideologically discordant factions united to squash fascism.

Inspired by British historian of modern France Julian Jackson’s book A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, the first of Baudry’s two-film project follows de Gaulle — played by French-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian with a slight deadpan to go along with the mythic gravitas — from the invasion of Poland in 1939 to the assassination of François Darlan (Mathieu Kassovitz), the high-ranking Vichy puppet-admiral that the Americans decided to take over as puppet-master after the Allied invasion of North Africa in December of 1942. The film moves from de Gaulle refusing to accept defeat and not recognizing the Vichy compromise with Hitler to his complicated relationship with Winston Churchill (an unserious Simon Russell Beale, here playing the prime minister for a second time), whom both legitimizes and props up Free France, through de Gaulle’s militaristic assent to actual (rather than hypothetical and recognized) power.

But the most interesting character here isn’t Abkarian’s mostly unknowable de Gaulle, and rather is Florian Lesieur’s young romantic Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, the man who assassinates Darlan at the film’s end. Résistance cuts between de Gaulle’s ascension and Bonnier and his friends, including his ahistorical Jewish lover, played by underrated showstopper Anamaria Vartolomei, which adds both the Shoah edge that Baudry largely puts aside for French sovereignty and the requisite romantic angle for the action blockbuster. (The university student turned action-first resistor may well resonate with contemporary French audiences given recent political events.) The real Bonnier was no Gaullist and, in fact, was a monarchist — though his ideology is re-written for dramatic political continuity and palatability in Résistance. After all, who cares who kills the Nazi collaborator?

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