The Guardian ·
De Gaulle: Liberté review – biopic of conquering French war hero reaches his imperial era
A shrewd performance by Simon Abkarian leads this blockbuster account of the wartime leader’s career as he ascends to political dominance
The massive and commercially triumphant two-part movie about General Charles de Gaulle comes to end with this second half, which does not, as I half expected it might, go into the complex area of De Gaulle’s postwar career and the issue of French Algeria. Maybe another movie, a part three, can cover this. Liberté takes us from De Gaulle’s growing international celebrity, or indeed notoriety, as the exiled keeper of the Free French flame, the king over the water, in which role his authority is still, however, contested and undermined. It includes the triumph of the D-Day landings and the liberation of France, in the course of which De Gaulle (Simon Abkarian) brings off the miracle of persuading the Americans, in the form of President Roosevelt (Campbell Scott), to back him when they had originally intended to treat postwar France as hardly more than a glorified US dependency, like postwar Japan.
De Gaulle’s stormy bromance with Winston Churchill (who is wonderfully played by Simon Russell Beale), continues from the first half, and the film genuinely has something new to say about Churchill’s Francophilia. It shows us De Gaulle’s foxy cunning, appearing to accept joint status in the provisional French government with General Henri Giraud (Thierry Lhermitte), his rival in the Allied leaders’ affections – and then deftly ousting him. But as in Résistance, the first part, it is in the African theatre of conflict that a new French hero arises; that is General Leclerc (Niels Schneider) whose maverick daring and improvisational brilliance is inspired by De Gaulle. Montgomery, incidentally, is shrewdly played by Pip Torrens, and I was wondering until the last moment if there would be a gamey cameo for Rommel, perhaps played by Lars Eidinger. But no. Germans are apparently not allowed in this mythic retelling.
As before, Abkarian has plenty of scenes where he gets out of military aircraft and haughtily sizes up the reception awaiting him, hyper-alert to tiny slights to his status and thereby to France itself. He cannot enter a room in this film without a moment in which he considers who is there and how they might insult him; Abkarian makes the most of this amusing dark comedy. Perhaps Liberté doesn’t quite have the intrigue and the intimate drama of the first half but it is still a rousingly watchable movie, a French production in the spirit of J Lee Thompson or John Sturges.
