Name: De Gaulle: Résistance
Director: Antonin Baudry
Genre: History, Drama
Released: 2026-08-28T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 160 min
Cast: Simon Abkarian, Simon Russell Beale, Benoît Magimel, Mathieu Kassovitz, Anamaria Vartolomei

A country has just signed away its own war, and one middle-ranking general decides the surrender does not bind him. That is the whole engine of Antonin Baudry’s De Gaulle: Résistance, and its nerve is to treat a founding national legend as something closer to a thriller of isolation. Here is a man with no army, no mandate and almost no allies, gambling that a voice carried on a foreign broadcaster can outlast a document signed at home.

Baudry, adapting Julian Jackson’s biography with Bérénice Vila, builds the film around that vacuum of authority rather than around any battlefield. His de Gaulle is not yet the granite figure of later French mythology; he is an awkward, obstinate exile in London, dealing with a British establishment that finds him useful and insufferable in more or less equal measure. The tension is administrative before it is military. Who recognises whom, whose signature counts, which broadcast actually gets made — the film grasps that in the collapse, those were the questions that decided everything. The now-canonical radio appeal, heard by almost no one on the night it went out, sits at the centre of the picture as an act of improvisation rather than a scripted turning point.

That reading depends entirely on the casting, and this is where the film shows its hand. Simon Abkarian, a stage actor of considerable gravity rather than a matinee lookalike, plays de Gaulle as a coiled, self-conscious outsider, forever performing a confidence he cannot yet institutionally claim. Opposite him, Simon Russell Beale gives Churchill as a man weighing an inconvenient Frenchman against the wider arithmetic of the war. The choice to build the film on two heavyweight theatre actors, rather than on spectacle, tells you what kind of picture Baudry wanted: a chamber piece about recognition, dressed in the scale of an epic.

Baudry comes to this with an unusual biography of his own. A former diplomat who spent years inside the Quai d’Orsay, he turned that world into the graphic novel behind the political satire The French Minister before moving to directing with the claustrophobic submarine thriller The Wolf’s Call. Both those works were, underneath, about people reading signals in a sealed room and deciding whom to trust. De Gaulle in exile is the same problem at national scale, which is perhaps why the material suits him: he films statecraft as a series of nervous, high-stakes conversations rather than as pageantry.

It is worth setting this beside the last screen de Gaulle, Gabriel Le Bomin’s intimate portrait built around the general’s marriage and his early broadcasts, which kept the man domestic and the history soft-focus. Baudry goes the other way, toward the harder tradition of French Resistance cinema — the moral cold of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, where heroism is mostly logistics, fear and waiting. What the new film inherits from that lineage is a suspicion of grandeur; what it updates is the willingness to put a still-mythologised living-memory figure at the centre and let him be graceless. The Anglo-French war drama, from the wartime propaganda pictures onward, rarely lets its Frenchman be this prickly, and almost never admits how contingent the whole enterprise of Free France was — how close the man at its centre came to being a footnote rather than a founder.

Whether the whole design earns its length is the open question. Splitting the story into a diptych, with a second film to come, is as much a distribution strategy as a dramatic necessity, and there is a real risk that reverence creeps back in over nearly two and three-quarter hours per installment. The great-man frame is hard to escape once you have hired a marquee cast to fill it, and a film about a man convinced of his own destiny can slide into agreeing with him. It premiered out of competition, a curated berth rather than a jury verdict, and the second half will decide whether this is a genuine reckoning with de Gaulle or a handsome monument to him.

Simon Abkarian as Charles de Gaulle in the Antonin Baudry film De Gaulle Résistance 2026 — Simon Abkarian as Charles de Gaulle in *De Gaulle: Résistance* (2026)

Around the two leads, Baudry assembles a dense bench of French players. Benoît Magimel appears as General Koenig, Mathieu Kassovitz as the compromised Admiral Darlan, Niels Schneider as the future liberator General Leclerc, Loïc Corbery as the politician René Pleven and Anamaria Vartolomei in the invented role of Livia, the film’s fictional window onto the exiles around the general. Pathé produces and distributes, with TF1 Films Production and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma among the backers — the same industrial machinery France reserves for its self-consciously national event pictures.

De Gaulle: Résistance, the first part of the diptych, premiered out of competition at Cannes and opened in French cinemas on 3 June, with a British and Irish release following on 28 August. Each part runs around 160 minutes. The companion film, titled Liberté internationally, carries the story through to the Liberation. Whether audiences outside France will sit for a two-film account of a figure they mostly know as a Paris airport remains the commercial gamble underneath the historical ambition.