CINEMA In theaters Wednesday, The Battle of De Gaulle: The Iron Agefirst part of the diptych on the General during the Second World War, seeks to paint a portrait beyond the myth.
Expected in theaters on Wednesday, Antonin Baudry’s new film traces the destiny of the hero of Free France from his arrival in London in June 1940 to the assassination of Admiral Darlan at the end of 1942, a central figure in the Vichy regime and short-lived rival of De Gaulle when he sided with the Americans. The director evokes several key episodes of the war such as De Gaulle’s attempt to land in Dakar, greeted by fire from the French fleet which remained loyal to Vichy.
In 1940, De Gaulle “was nobody, a complete unknown”, explains Antonin Baudry, who was an advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Dominique de Villepin before turning to cinema. In London, he occupied a modest apartment where he tried to organize the resistance while France, led by Marshal Pétain, signed the armistice with Nazi Germany. “There was something quite chivalrous but potentially quite crazy in his approach”, continues the director, who assures that he does not have a fascination for great men but rather “for solitude”.
De Gaulle was an isolated man in 1940: sentenced to death, he was perceived as a traitor in France. However, he managed to gradually bring together civilians and soldiers around him to organize the fight and established himself as a privileged interlocutor with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. “How is it that his rather crazy dream (editor’s note: to be the legitimate representative of France) came true? It’s astonishing how many times it shouldn’t have worked,” says Antonin Baudry, comparing him to “a modern Don Quixote, a sort of knight from another age.”
What interests me is the figure of the skinned alive from 1940
Antonin Baudry, director
Antonin Baudry has brought together a leading cast to replay the historical figures of this era, starting with Simon Abkarian who plays De Gaulle. Mathieu Kassovitz plays Admiral Darlan, Benoît Magimel plays General Koenig, hero of the Battle of Bir Hakeim, and Niels Schneider plays General Leclerc who switched part of the French colonies to the side of Free France.
The first part of this historic fresco will be released on June 3, before a second part on July 3. Pathé is producing the biggest French film of the year, with a total budget of around 70 million euros for the two films.
The Second World War «repolitisée»
Presented at the avant-premier at Cannes in May, The Battle of Gaulle arrives in an edition marked by films about the Second World War: Fatherlandby Pawel Pawlikowski (ex-aequo directing prize), shows Germany in 1949, Our Salvation by Emmanuel Marre (screenplay prize) traces the life of the director’s grandfather, a small civil servant in Vichy, or even Moulin by Laszlo Nemes, with Gilles Lellouche in the role of the famous resistance fighter.
“Unquestionably, we are witnessing a particular moment where the subject is reactivated”, “repoliticized”, explains historian Sylvie Lindeperg. “Today’s crisis and conflicts very directly threaten the international order that was born from the Second World War. This order is collapsing before our eyes. It is the object of a methodical, brutal destruction of all the principles and also of the authorities which were put in place at the end of the Second World War precisely to prevent such a tragedy from being repeated,” she further analyzes.
Avant Our salvationthe film Rays and shadowsby Xavier Giannoli, released in March, already told the war from the point of view of collaboration. The first film focuses on an ordinary civil servant, one of the thousands of anonymous people who continued to work under Vichy (played by Swann Arlaud), the second focuses on a more spectacular figure of collaboration – Jean Luchaire, press boss shot at the Liberation, played by Jean Dujardin in Rays and shadowswas one of these “great collaborators”. The representation of collaboration in cinema “was slow to be addressed by cinema, firstly because of film censorship,” says Sylvie Lindeperg: “It awakens shame, wounds of national pride, memories of wars Franco-French. The convening of the Resistance, on the contrary, had for a very long time precisely the objective of uniting the national community.” The historian judges that “filmmakers work according to the issues of the present time”: a historical film is always a film in the present.”
The Battle of De Gaulle – The Iron Age,
by Antonin Baudry. Released Wednesday.
