French cinema has stopped being chic
Amongst many men of my acquaintance, this season’s biggest blockbuster is not The Odyssey, but the new French epic De Gaulle. The first part, entitled Résistance, was released in British cinemas last month and has immediately become a cause célèbre with the kind of people who grumble that there hasn’t been a great war movie since the halcyon days of Where Eagles Dare and The Great Escape, and that the recent vogue for downbeat revisionism has meant that stirring and heroic tales of national fortitude have gone out of vogue. The second part of the story, Liberté, was released on 18 September. Presumably it, too, will find a ready-made audience, ready to thrill to the battle scenes and psychological duel between Simon Akbarian’s De Gaulle and Simon Russell Beale’s Churchill.
