Gallic blood is boiling over Netflix’s star-studded film of the battle of Agincourt, the King, amid claims it is riddled with historical inaccuracies, dangerously jingoistic and “anti-French”.
The French have long railed against William Shakespeare’s take on Henry V’s legendary 1415 victory in northern France, which left an indelible mark in England as one of its greatest military triumphs and a high point in the Hundred Years War.
But the Bard’s poetic licence pales into comparison with David Michôd’s feature released in selected UK cinemas on October 11 and on Netflix earlier this month starring Timothée Chalamet, Lily Rose Depp, Robert Pattinson and Joel Edgerton.
That is according to Christophe Gilliot, head of newly renovated Agincourt museum.
"I’m outraged. The image of the French is really sullied. The film has Francophobe tendencies,” he said, taking offence at Pattinson’s hammed-up take of the French Dauphin Louis de Guyenne, Henry’s nemesis.
“The British far-Right are going to lap this up, it will flatter nationalist egos over there,” he predicted.
English “raping and pillaging” was totally overlooked and the king’s cold-blooded execution of his French prisoners glossed over, despite them having “their throats slit and heads crushed with sledgehammers” or “faces slashed with daggers”.
On the other hand, the film invents a scene in which the French force English boys to murder one of their own before being massacred, said Mr Gilliot, slamming the depiction as “outrageous demonisation”.
The film was rife with historical untruths, he complained, including the suggestion that the battle took place in a mountainous area – Agincourt was all but flat with a slight rise – or that Henry had to be talked into waging war by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Henry’s depiction as a sensitive leader dragged into a conflict he would have rather avoided was total rubbish, said the Agincourt expert. Far from being a peace-loving pretty boy, he was a brutal, bloodthirsty war criminal with a massive scar from an arrow wound on his cheek, he said.
“He had a sinister look and behaviour to match,” he told France 3.
Recent research dismisses as well wide of the mark Shakespeare’s claims that Henry’s “happy few” defeated a French army that outnumbered his men by five to one. The figures were most likely 12,000 French to as many as 9,000 English, they say.
In an attempt to redress such historical “myths” of English prowess, French First Lady Brigitte Macron this summer inaugurated the newly renovated museum in the village that was the setting for the confrontation on St Crispin’s Day.
“We are disgusted because in two hours, this type of film demolishes all the mediation work we have been doing here (at the museum) over the past eight years and the research of historians”, including British ones, said Mr Gillot.
“It’s really worrying that one can re-write history to this extent and it is hard for us to fight against this. The public will always prefer a film to a history book. But here there are people under this earth, people who really died in this battle, that’s what disturbs me the most.”
When asked about his interpretation of events at its London launch, Mr Michôd said: "Our version is very different to Shakespeare’s and it is very much about a young man being consumed by the institutions of power. There are various version of Henry V basically about a heroic king invading a country. To us, this story needed to be more complicated than that one."
The film has had mixed reviews.
While Variety praised it as an “engrossing royal-court historical drama”, the BBC’s Nicholas Barber called it an overly solemn “diary of a wimpy king” and the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin panned it as a “Shakespeare-mangling death march trudge” that “moves like a rhinoceros through porridge”.
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