De Gaulle: Résistance (Tilting Iron) (2026)
Authority, in Antonin Baudry’s De Gaulle: Résistance (Tilting Iron), is not inherited or granted. It is willed into being, one broadcast at a time, by a man standing alone at a borrowed BBC microphone, no government behind him, no army to speak of. Nothing else. That is the argument the film spends two and a half hours making, and it is a more unsettling one than the poster suggests.
June 1940: France signs an armistice that most of the exhausted, humiliated country is relieved to accept. De Gaulle refuses it. He flees to London and sets about convincing a scattering of British officials, colonial administrators, and eventually his own countrymen that resistance is neither finished nor futile. Simon Abkarian plays him with a stillness I found more unsettling than any of the film’s battle scenes: jaw set, eyes fixed somewhere past whoever he’s addressing, a man who has decided certainty is a tool rather than a feeling.
Simon Russell Beale’s Churchill is the film’s other great pleasure, warm where de Gaulle is glacial, and their scenes together generate real friction between two vain men who need each other and resent the need in equal measure. Pierre Cottereau’s cinematography favours cramped rooms and long corridors over sweeping vistas. Small spaces, not armies. That is where this film happens.
Baudry, a former diplomat who wrote and directed Quai d’Orsay, does not let de Gaulle off easily for the myth he is building. Late in the film a British official asks, more or less, who exactly appointed him, and the question hangs in the air rather than getting a clean answer. Fair question. It is a seductive idea that legitimacy can simply be asserted until the world catches up, and a dangerous one, and the film seems to know it. The closing disclaimer, acknowledging the cinematic licence taken with the historical record, reads less like a legal formality than a confession: its subject built his own myth in real time, and the film has just done the same on his behalf.
Where that argument goes soft is with everyone standing in de Gaulle’s way. Mathieu Kassovitz’s Darlan and the Vichy officials around him register as obstacles rather than people, drawn with a thinness the rest of the cast never suffers from. A film this interested in how one man manufactures authority against real resistance needed opponents with a comparable interior life; instead it gave itself an easy foil, and the theme is thinner for it. Weak spot.
None of that undoes what the film gets right. Not close. At two hours and forty minutes it never drags, which is its own achievement, and it left me thinking about the gap between authority that is granted and authority that is simply asserted until nobody thinks to ask permission anymore. This is the first half of a two-part story, Résistance (Tilting Iron) and Liberté. On this evidence, anyone who cares about how power gets made, not just how it gets used, should be first in line for the second instalment.