I went in expecting a monument and came out more French than I have felt in years of living in London.

Antonin Baudry’s film, the first of two parts, is adapted from Julian Jackson’s A Certain Idea of France, and there is something pleasing in a French epic of this scale resting on a British historian. It has the sense not to treat its subject as an ‘intouchable relique’.

The de Gaulle here is deluded, frequently absurd, entirely irrational and convinced of himself in a way that borders on the theological. He is also right. Holding both at once is the film’s argument, about him and, less comfortably, about the rest of us.

Simon Abkarian is remarkable, which supports a theory I hold; biopics are best served by actors whose faces we do not already know. The last French attempt cast Lambert Wilson, a star, and one spends half of it admiring the performance rather than following the man. Abkarian carries no such freight. He plays solitude rather than greatness, the correct instinct for a general with no army, no money, no mandate, with only a channel on the BBC. That earlier film was built around the family; here his wife and daughter arrive almost unremarked, and the restraint does more work.

In June 1940, the assumption was that France was finished, and Britain, alone on its island, was already turning towards Washington. Into that walks an acting brigadier general nobody has heard of, with a borrowed flat in Hampstead and one unreasonable proposition: that the battle of France is neither over nor lost.

The film understands how absurd that sounded in a Whitehall drawing room, and how narrow the margin was between absurdity and what actually happened.

Simon Russell Beale’s Churchill is the counterweight, and gets the best scene: Dakar, an operation with no rational case for it, and Churchill’s brief, almost French decision to gamble anyway.

Baudry allows himself jokes, and they land. The scale is its own statement – French cinema can now build spectacle without apology – and Bir Hakeim, underplayed even in French schools, is finally given its sequence. Fernand’s half-romance could go unmissed. De Gaulle was born in Lille. So was I, and the film catches what ‘Les Gens du Nord’ embodies: resilience, with warmth underneath, and the absolute refusal to be reasonable about anything that matters.

I do not share his politics. I did not expect a war film to make me patriotic, or to keep me thinking for the rest of the day. It did both.

Angèle Fontaine is an Editorial Intern at Aspects of History.