I went in fully expecting to cry, and cried anyway, for most of the duration. Knowing how a story ends turns out to be no protection at all.

Baudry’s second part opens at the end of 1942 and closes in the autumn of 1944, and it is a different beast from the first. L’Âge de fer was about one man’s solitude, the savagery of the desert and of Hampstead, a general with a borrowed flat and no army. J’écris ton nom is about what happens when that solitude finally finds other people, and about the far less romantic business of being recognised as legitimate by allies who would rather you were not.

Which gives the film its finest scene, and it is almost burlesque: two French generals negotiating who commands a France neither of them governs, with Washington and London quietly backing the other man. Thierry Lhermitte’s Giraud is magnificent, and an immediate problem for the theory I advanced here a few weeks ago, that biopics are best served by actors whose faces we do not already know. Lhermitte’s face has been in every French living room for forty years, and it does not matter for a second. I withdraw the rule and keep the exception.

I have been watching Niels Schneider for years, for reasons not strictly cinematic… but what was new to me was Leclerc himself. He came from an aristocratic, monarchist family, exactly the background that was expected to produce a loyal Vichy officer, but he ends up as the soldier whose name the Republic puts on its street signs. The film is good on the small things too. That cane he is always carrying has nothing to do with a wound: it is a hunting habit, and the script makes a point of saying so. He drives at Rommel’s tanks in a roofless jeep, which tells you everything about the man that a speech could not. The desert sequence built around it is the most beautiful thing in either film.

Félix Kysyl plays Jean Moulin (aka. Rex, Max), the youngest prefect in France, his adolescent face doing work that should have required somebody much older. I went to Chartres recently, entirely by accident, and discovered I share a birthday with the man. I have thought about very little else since. Gilles Lellouche plays him again in László Nemes’s Moulin later this month – having seen Kysyl, I will only say that this is a choice.

France is depicting this period obsessively at the moment. Notre salut, which took the screenplay prize at Cannes and reached cinemas this week, approaches the same years from an opposite perspective: Vichy from the inside, collaboration as paperwork, cowardice as a career. Watch it alongside this one and you have something close to the whole truth, which neither film can manage on its own.

That appetite is not accidental. People are queuing again for anyone offering them something to belong to, and this film hands them a large-nosed, impossible man to hold on to. It works because we need it to, which is not a criticism.

Paris liberates itself, Baudry giving the city to the Parisians rather than to the tanks, which is not a directorial flourish, but as per the historical record. The film ends with Éluard, whose Liberté was composed in 1942 and dropped over occupied France by the RAF – it supplies both the title and the final minutes. The name being written on everything, in the end, is not the general’s.

I still do not share his politics. I have rarely been so glad to be from the country that produced him.

Angèle Fontaine is an Editorial Intern at Aspects of History.