De Gaulle: a stuck biopic (review)

The film by Gabriel le Bomin confirms the difficulty of making the general a great fictional figure.

France 3 is programming the biopic of Charles de Gaulle with Lambert Wilson, released in March 2020 in cinemas, just before the start of the first confinement. Offered again when theaters reopened in June, it performed well throughout, reaching 850,000 admissions.

They played De Gaulle before Samuel Labarthe

Unfortunately, the editorial staff of First remained unmoved by this story “stuck” of the life of the politician. Here is our review.

Focused on the weeks preceding the appeal of June 18, Gabriel Le Bomin's biopic confirms the difficulty of making the general a great fictional figure. Unable to play de Gaulle as he revered him so much, Jean-Pierre Melville briefly depicted him from behind in Army of Shadows for a scene which also sounds a little false. Founder, this admission of impotence could have, unwittingly, protected the image of the general in the cinema from which he is singularly absent.

It is therefore quite feverishly that we awaited Gabriel Le Bomin's film on the ground, precisely, of representation. The frustration is still there. Despite his artificial nose and chin supposed to physically bring him closer to his model, Lambert Wilson is unable to reproduce the Gaullian gesture, this both humble and grandiloquent way of embodying France. The character's uprightness, his modesty, his somewhat obsolete lyricism ultimately make him someone not very romantic, unsuitable for fiction. The scenes facing the Rabelaisian Churchill (Tim Hudson) – whom de Gaulle tries to rally to the cause of Free France – are edifying on this point: the mutt side of one highlights the stiffness of the other.

Is it a question of culture (Churchill was so incarnated that he gradually became a pop figure)? Capacity (French actors are less adept at transformation and composition than the Anglo-Saxons)? Difficult to give a clear answer. Still, it is not by trying to humanize de Gaulle, through his quarrels with Pétain and the “defeatists”and his too-perfect love story with Yvonne, which we “gets” de Gaulle. This film remains to be made.

Simon Abkarian will be the Charles de Gaulle of the director of Chant du loup