La Bataille de Gaulle, my Bastille Day with the General

There were two ways to be French this Tuesday, July 14. You could wait for tonight's World Cup semifinal between France and Spain^[1], or you could lock yourself in the dark for five hours and sixteen minutes with Charles de Gaulle. Anyone who read my SGDQ article can guess which way I leaned, and since I don't have a Letterboxd account, this blog will double as my movie notebook, as it already did for The Wave.

A full day at the movies takes some planning when you're the father of a four-year-old. Negotiations with my partner, who watched our daughter in the meantime, came at a steep price. Fine, I'm exaggerating, she was great about it, but whole days to myself don't come around every month, and if I was going to spend one being this thoroughly French, the national holiday seemed like the obvious date.

Five hours and sixteen minutes, watch in hand

The project commands respect before the first frame. Pathé handed Antonin Baudry, co-writing with Bérénice Vila, a story split across two films released three weeks apart, L'Âge de fer (The Iron Age) on June 3 and J'écris ton nom (I Write Your Name) on June 26, running 159 and 157 minutes on an announced budget of 74 million euros^[2]. The second title quotes the refrain of Paul Éluard's "Liberté," a poem French schoolchildren still learn by heart, which tells you something about the level of care. From the Montcornet counterattack in May 1940 to the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the two films cover four years of war, and French audiences have kept up, with the pair closing in on 2.5 million admissions by early July^[3].

A marathon, then, and I swallowed it whole with an enthusiasm the air conditioning only partly explains, though in this weather it has earned the mention, since I've already told you what heat does to me^[4]. I never once checked the time. Everything moves, everything holds your attention, and while the films never flash their sources on screen, you can feel actual history under the storytelling. Whole chapters from my school years came back to me, material I thought I had handed in along with my final exams.

London didn't want him

I won't give much away, certainly not the best scenes, but I'll admit my surprise at the trouble de Gaulle runs into when he lands in London. You picture Free France backed from day one by convinced allies; the film shows a man nearly alone, an inconvenience to the British and a suspect to the Americans. Simon Abkarian inhabits the role without ever drifting into impression, opposite a delicious Simon Russell Beale as Churchill, and the cast lined up behind them (Niels Schneider as Leclerc, Mathieu Kassovitz as Darlan, Thierry Lhermitte as Giraud) has no weak link^[2:1]. I usually run cold on French movies, and I tip my hat anyway. The direction and the acting are exemplary.

Banknotes with an agenda

The second film tightened my throat, because it deals less in battles than in sovereignty. It shows a plan for carving up Europe that chills the blood, banknotes that say more than any speech, and a training school that would be funny if it weren't real. The dizzying part is how little the movies invented. The Allies really did print money for liberated France in Massachusetts, the "flag notes" that landed in soldiers' packs on June 6, 1944, and that de Gaulle denounced as counterfeit currency^[5], while American officers trained at Yale and Charlottesville for careers as administrators of France^[6]. De Gaulle's ideas about national sovereignty haven't aged a day, and with the 2027 presidential election approaching, the candidates could stand to take notes of their own and treat foreign interference as the danger it is.

A few more minutes, Mister President

The only thing missing is an epilogue. I would have taken a few more minutes to see the General in his president's uniform, outside the frame of war, or at least of the military kind, since the political kind never signs an armistice. I won't hold it against the films; I hadn't had this good a time at the movies in years.

And I'm going back this week, because Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey opens in France tomorrow^[7], an American mega-production shot in IMAX 70mm with Matt Damon as Odysseus. Homer's poem has fascinated me since forever, so I'm walking in already won over, which is the surest way to walk out disappointed. I'll report back in a future article, unless it turns out to be a disaster, in which case I'll spare you a long rant about nothing.