Now see this: a gripping lesson in leadership and courage |
In the Palace Electric this weekend, a film with a boring title about a dead, straightlaced politician who once led a distant country is playing. The film is in French with subtitles. It's quite long. Go and see it.
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Despite my down-beat sales pitch, De Gaulle: Résistance is gripping. It's a great drama about the man himself, of course, but there's also a side story about a lad who is inspired by de Gaulle's wartime broadcasts from London, and who is then caught up in the resistance to Hitler's many collaborators in Vichy France.
In this sub-plot, there is a will-they-won't-they love interest. The film is not a dry, historical drama. Parts are weepy romance - and that, in my moist eyes, is just fine.
But above all, the film will make you feel better about politicians, and you may need that restorative feeling at the moment.
It's not in the film but when Charles de Gaulle became president of France after the war, he installed an electricity meter in the Elysee presidential palace so that his own consumption would not be paid for by the taxpayer. In our sometimes squalid times, we should take off a chapeau to that.
I suppose that a public service town needs no reminding of the importance of public service - but approval and confirmation is still nice to have.
The film is in two parts and only the first, De Gaulle: Résistance, is playing at the moment. It is about de Gaulle's time in London, and his testy relationship with Churchill (starring the French actor Simon Abkarian as de Gaulle and Simon Russell Beale........