‘De Gaulle: Tilting Iron’ review: Broad-brush, old-fashioned biopic of former French president Charles de Gaulle

Dir: Antonin Baudry. France. 2026. 160mins

This loud and proud biographical drama about the exiled wartime leader and later French president Charles de Gaulle, goes big whenever the opportunity arises. You want a tank? Have ten! You want another shot of huge crowds at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris? Pourquoi pas! At its best, De Gaulle: Tilting Iron feels like classroom history that has come energetically to life on a generous budget for wide audience appeal. At its worst, this action-heavy wartime drama offers visual and narrative echoes of a live-action colonial Tintin adventure. Subtlety and focus willingly doff their képi – the peaked military cap which De Gaulle made iconic – to broad-brushstrokes storytelling. 

 Offers visual and narrative echoes of a live-action colonial Tintin adventure

This mostly French-language, 160-minute film screens out of competition at Cannes and is the first of a two-part project. Pathé Films releases this instalment in French cinemas on June 10, with the second, De Gaulle: The Sovereign Edge, following on July 3. The film’s national-origin-story patriotism should appeal to domestic audiences while its robust action-thriller tendencies could tempt audiences elsewhere. The film has already sold to several territories, including Australia (Rialto), Benelux (The Searchers), Canada (Immina) and Spain (YouPlanet). One can easily imagine another life for these two films as a series on a streamer. 

The Great Man Theory of history is alive and well in De Gaulle: Tilting Iron – not least because significant female characters are close to non-existent. The cast is as sprawling as the story’s geography, which takes in France, the UK, the US, Libya and several countries of west Africa. It includes Benoît Magimel as Koenig, the grizzled general who valiantly held out against the Nazis at Bir Hakeim in 1942, and Mathieu Kassovitz as Darlan, the admiral in Marshal Pétain’s French government under Nazi occupation.

But the central dynamic is a relationship of mutual affection – not without its hiccups – between De Gaulle (Simon Abkarian) and Winston Churchill (Simon Russell Beale). Drawing on British historian Julian Jackson’s 2018 biography A Certain Idea Of France, the film makes a case for Churchill having an affection and admiration for De Gaulle when most in his circle, including US President Franklin D Roosevelt (Campbell Scott), were much more cynical about this stubborn and less-than-endearing character.

French director Antonin Baudry, who previously made the 2019 submarine thriller The Wolf’s Call and before that was an author and diplomat, doesn’t ask us to like the man, but he does invite us to wonder at De Gaulle’s moral strength and tactical intransigence. Abkarian does a good job physically of capturing De Gaulle – helped by that distinctive lacquered hair combover – but he struggles to render in flesh this lofty icon in the making.

One of the film’s more appealing eccentricities, at least for English-speaking audiences, is that Russell Beale performs heavily in French as Churchill. This unusual angle aside, Churchill is a character so recognisable that it’s hard to get beyond the surface. The screenplay by Baudry and Bérénice Vila also struggles with moments of intimacy. Part of the problem is that there’s no real separation of the public and private: even behind closed doors the focus on both De Gaulle and Churchill is on their diplomacy, which in reality is just another sort of public performance. Their families and vulnerabilities barely get a look-in.

A subplot involving the politicisation of young French resistance fighters reminds us that the war was also being fought on the domestic, civilian front, and it allows the film to reference, briefly, the plight of Jews in France. But it feels awkwardly like a sideshow to the main event.

That’s not to say there aren’t pleasures. Taken as a near-caricature, Abkarian is amusing as De Gaulle; the many action sequences are rendered with vigour; and the script manages to make a detailed sequence of events accessible and straight-forward. De Gaulle: Tilting Iron is distinctly old-fashioned and unsubtle – and often as brash and overbearing as Volker Bertelmann’s score – but it has some strengths as an uncomplicated historical spectacle.