DE GAULLE: RÉSISTANCE
- Colin Fraser
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
THREE AND A HALF STARS France falls to the Nazis. In exile, General De Gaulle foments a resistance movement that would change the course of the war.
PERIOD DRAMA FRANCE French #DEGAULLE Starring Simon Abkarian, Simon Russell Beale
DE GAULLE: RESISTANCE is an ambitious and surprisingly gripping historical epic which makes its considerable running time feel rather less daunting than it has any right to. This is a defiantly mounted first chapter in a larger story, charting Charles de Gaulle's emergence as the voice of Free France after the country's catastrophic collapse in 1940. It has the polished sheen of prestige streaming television, but Antonin Baudry's lavish production repeatedly reminds us that some films really are made for the cinema.
With France defeated and Marshal Pétain's government accepting an armistice with Germany, de Gaulle refuses to accept that the nation itself has ceased to exist. He escapes to London with precious little conventional authority behind him, yet proceeds to behave as though he already represents France. From Britain, his broadcasts call on French soldiers and civilians to reject surrender and maintain the fight.
Meanwhile, the film follows the emergence of resistance within occupied France. Away from London's government rooms and diplomatic manoeuvring, ordinary people begin to turn anger and humiliation into acts of defiance against both the Nazis and the Vichy government. It seldom ends well. The growing underground movement as seen through the eyes of naive youth provides a useful counterpoint to de Gaulle's lofty political project. His speeches may give resistance a voice, but it is those living under occupation who must turn words into action, often at terrible personal cost.
Central to the film's success is the relationship between de Gaulle and Winston Churchill. It is also its most surprising source of entertainment. Simon Russell Beale brings warmth, wit and a wonderfully exasperated humanity to Churchill, while de Gaulle is portrayed as almost impossibly stiff, focused and single-minded. Simon Abkarian makes him a man of extraordinary conviction, but not necessarily someone you’d want to have dinner with. Yet despite their differences, scenes between the two are enormously engaging, their increasingly important alliance resembling a relationship between two men who need each other more than they’re willing to admit.
The production is lush, confident and frequently spectacular. There is a degree of Netflixification to its approach: the pace is quickly turned up to eleven and stays there. There's little time to breathe and with that, absorb the emotional impact on both characters and ourselves. The breadth, episodic structure and sheer length sometimes make it feel like it could have been released as a prestige television series and with Part Two (another 160 minutes) due soon, the completed work may well end up there.
However, television would diminish its finest moments and there are many. The Battle of Bir Hakeim in particular demands the scope of a big cinema screen. Large-scale, tense and visually impressive, it provides the physical realisation behind all of de Gaulle's rhetoric: Free France is no longer simply an idea.
Although DE GAULLE: RESISTANCE lacks the heart-felt tug you'd hope for in a work of this scale, it remains an absorbing, beautifully produced historical drama that sustains its momentum remarkably well. 160 minutes is a long time to spend with such a stubbornly unappealing central figure. The fact that it rarely feels that way is one of Baudry’s many impressive achievements.
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