'De Gaulle: Résistance' Review: A General in Exile, a Country at War

Charles de Gaulle finally gets his epic: 'De Gaulle: Résistance,' a two-part, 2-hour-40-minute film directed by Antonin Baudry, is now in theaters. It centers on the general's exile from France and the birth of the Free French movement as the Nazis close in.

For a figure of his stature, de Gaulle has had a surprisingly small cinematic profile. He was decisive in World War II, yet he never actually saw action in Europe. That gap is exactly what Baudry's film fills — not with battlefield heroics, but with political maneuver.

The script draws on a book by the British historian Julian Jackson. It doesn't soften its subject. Some political operatives in the film view de Gaulle with open cynicism. 'A petty colonel promoted to general during the rout,' one observer calls him.

Who plays whom?

Simon Abkarian takes the lead, and his imperiousness tracks with real-life archival footage of the man. In London, de Gaulle moves fast. After the Nazi invasion of France, he gets on the BBC to rally the resistance — and he befriends Prime Minister Winston Churchill, played by Simon Russell Beale. The two men resolve to compel the United States to enter the war.

The film runs a second storyline in parallel: two young resistance fighters, Fernand (Florian Lesieur) and Livia (Anamaria Vartolomei), whose rage at the Vichy government (France's collaborationist regime under Nazi occupation) drives them to radical action.

Where does the story go?

The narrative follows de Gaulle to Brazzaville — then part of French Equatorial Africa, now the Republic of Congo — where he declares the city the capital of Free France. It's a chapter of the war rarely staged on screen, and the film treats it as the strategic turning point it was.

Not everything lands equally. The scenes of de Gaulle in a tank, largely computer-generated, carry less charge than the simple depictions of the man strategizing with his own staff. The intimate war-room material, not the spectacle, is where the film finds its footing.

Even with its generous running time, the movie strains to contain all the action it aspires to convey. And a sequel is coming, which explains both the compression and the open threads.

What does this change for viewers? Mainly this: a major 20th-century figure, long under-served by cinema, now has a serious screen treatment grounded in a historian's work rather than myth.

'De Gaulle: Résistance' is not rated. It's in French and English, with subtitles, and runs 2 hours 40 minutes. It's playing in theaters.