French slam Netflix’s Henry V as ‘English propaganda’
A new Netflix epic on Henry V has been criticised in France as crude pro-English propaganda that plays fast and loose with the facts of the Battle of Agincourt.
a 140-minute feature directed by Australian David Michod and starring Timothee Chalamet, Robert Pattinson and Joel Edgerton, has come under fire for blackening the French even more than Shakespeare’s patriotic version of the English victory in 1415.
The film, based on the two Henry
IV plays and Henry V, was released in British cinemas last month and on Netflix last week.
‘‘The real Henry V behaved more like a war criminal than wellmeaning man of peace, especially at Agincourt, where he ordered the execution of numerous prisoners,’’ France 3 television said.
Christophe Gilliot, director of the
Agincourt battlefield museum, said that he was outraged by the way Michod ‘‘deforms a reality already deformed by Shakespeare’’. Chalamet’s young king is depicted as a humanist and a pacifist whereas the real Henry was a brutal killer whose bloodthirsty character had already been toned down by Shakespeare, Gilliot said.
‘‘The image of the French has really been tarnished. The film leaves a taste of Francophobia . . . The British far Right is going to welcome this. It will delight the nationalist egos over there,’’ he said.
He cited British experts who have worked on debunking much of the legend of an almighty French army being wiped out by Henry’s ‘‘happy few’’.
The real French force numbered about 12,000 compared with England’s 9000, they say.
The French have also mocked the Dauphin Louis, the villain of the film played by Pattinson, as an arrogant, cowardly caricature with similarities to the French knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
called Pattinson’s French accent ‘‘hilarious’’.
Michod said last month: ‘‘Our version is very much about a young man being consumed by the institutions of power.’’
‘‘The image of the French has really been tarnished. The film leaves a taste of Francophobia . . . The British far Right is going to welcome this. It will delight the nationalist egos over there.’’
Christophe Gilliot, director of the Agincourt battlefield museum