Sacre feu!
An old church, a raging inferno and gridlock are the real stars of Jean-jacques Annaud’s minute-by-minute Notre Dame disaster.
Notre Dame on Fire
Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud • Writers: Jean-Jacques Annaud, Thomas Bidegain
Starring: Samuel Labarthe, Jean-Paul Bordes, Mikaël Chirinian, Jérémie Laheurte, Xavier Maly, Ava Baya, Maximilien Seweryn, Dimitri Storoge, Chloé Jouannet, Oumar Diolo
France / Italy • 1hr 50mins
Opens Hong Kong December 1 • IIA
Grade: B-
While not quite the Challenger disaster or 9/11, the April day (the 15th) in 2019 when Notre-Dame de Paris erupted in flames and threatened to collapse into the Seine was a memorable one, and it’s chronicled almost minute by minute in director Jean-Jacques Annaud’s semi-disaster epic, semi-biopic of one of the most famous structures in the world, Notre Dame on Fire (Notre-Dame brûle). You don’t have to be Catholic to have raised a shocked palm to the mouth and declared, “Oh dear” when the news hit that the 12th century French Gothic cathedral and setting for The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Disney coughed up US$5 million towards the restoration, so far silence from the stinking rich Catholic Church, but that’s another story) was in danger of burning to the ground.
In Notre Dame on Fire Annaud and co-writer Thomas Bidegain, best known for heady fare like A Prophet and Rust and Bone, dispense with superfluous character development and backstory and keep the camera focused squarely on the burning building on Île de la Cité, and the efforts, often stymied, to save it and the valuable artefacts housed inside – including an alleged nail from The Crucifixion and the Crown of Thorns. We know how this story ends (kind of happily), we know no one died (luckily) so Annaud and Bidegain have their work cut out for them on the tension-creation front. Fortunately, cleverly deployed news/archive/social media footage, subtle jabs at bureaucratic sloppiness and Paris traffic snarls lend a hand.
800 years up in flames
With nearly 900 years of weather and pollution under its belt, Notre-Dame is in need of a little maintenance, which is happening the day a new security guard (Oumar Diolo) starts working in the cathedral. While he’s getting the briefest of job orientations, restoration crews are swarming all over the edifice – and frequently taking smoke breaks. Below, swarms of tourists (this was in Before Times) get a concise history of the church, and the faithful gather for mass (cue irritating child who insists on going back into a burning building). Deep in the bowels of the roof structure beneath the flèche, where 800-year old wood beams hold it up, a pigeon pecks at some kind of power cable, the electric wires that power the bells spark and appear to short out. Whatever it is, something starts the smoke rising at a little past 6pm. Rush hour! The new security guard alerts the right people but the old warning system sends them to the wrong place, and by the time they get up 300 steps (!) to the cathedral attic, the blaze is alive. It’s then, when the fire’s been building for an hour, the fire brigade is alerted – after a colleague on vacation in Italy sees images on Instagram.
The rest of the film details the seemingly endless stream of obstacles faced by fire generals Gontier and Gallet (Samuel Labarthe and Jean-Paul Bordes), Laurent Prades (Mikaël Chirinian), Notre-Dame’s antiquities officer and holder of crucial keys to the Crown – who’s stuck in traffic on the way back from Versailles – and the monsignor (Xavier Maly) on site to implore the fire crews to rescue the relics slowly getting smoked inside. The trucks with the hoses Gontier and Gallet need so badly are – wait for it – stuck in traffic, and a panicky architect keeps warning them the church’s porous stone is in danger of crumbling with all the water they keep pouring on it despite the cracked pipes that are affecting pressure. Donald Trump tweets. The situation is what is classically referred to as a “clusterfuck.”
That’s a lot of wood
Not just a church…
In most circumstances documentary material clangs with dramatisations in films, often taking you out of the moment to gaze upon the real person or event, but in Notre Dame on Fire it actually works. Unlike traditional archive footage (grainy, lo-res), modern phones provide such high definition pictures they fit in (more) seamlessly with new images, even ones shot for IMAX, and make it easy to forget we learn absolutely nothing about the firefighters, art historians and cathedral staff at the centre of the story. But that’s okay, because in this case they’re not the centre of the story: Notre-Dame is, as is the place it holds at the heart of Parisian, probably French, culture and identity. Annaud has always been a visualist; his international breakout Quest for Fire told a dense narrative with no dialogue (he did it again in The Bear), and he proved he could manoeuvre in a church – spatially and religiously – with the best in The Name of the Rose. Notre Dame on Fire isn’t a great film, but it’s an an arresting visual document of national grief, and a fascinating procedural that will do nothing if not teach you to pull the fuck over when you hear a siren. — DEK