I went to the movies twice this week, to see the two-part summer French blockbuster La Bataille de Gaulle [The Battle of de Gaulle] (2026). Unless you are in France you have probably not heard about it, but it is (according to Wikipedia) one of the most expensive French films of all time (although at $85 million USD that makes it less than half of a standard Marvel movie, and it’s really two movies at that), and it has been advertised very heavily here as the summer blockbuster. My French still has lots of room for improvement but I thought it would be interesting even if I missed a lot of it.1
Check out this trailer — which in true French fashion stubbornly refuses to let the watcher put subtitles on it, much less translated ones! De Gaulle would approve…!
It hits all of the Spielbergian World War II notes, that is for sure. It’s Saving Private Ryan, but for the French. And I have to say, I thought it was really entertaining. It does that perfect little dance of building and releasing tension that good war movies do, where it makes things feel hopeless and then, at the last moment, victory is obtained. It is also pretty funny at times — despite its at times dour subject, it manages to keep things moving along. (Thank goodness for Simon Russell Beale’s portrayal of Churchill, whose appearances are almost always a form of comic relief.)
Is the film historically accurate? I am not an expert on this side of World War II, and found myself having to look up a lot of things afterwards, and my sense is that aspects of it are accurate, aspects of it are fictionalized/streamlined/simplified, and that the overall argument of the film is one of several ways to interpret these events. Which is to say, not so different from pretty much any plausibly accurate historical drama, where “accuracy” is a tricky standard to apply.
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