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Join Telegram ChannelJean-Jacques Annaud's desire for great popular cinema comes up against a poverty of writing that fails to truly dramatize the fire of 2019.
TF1 will round off the weekend with a new drama on free-to-air television: Notre-Dame is burningby Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Name of the Rose, Seven Years in Tibet…). Is this movie worth it? Here is the review of First.
When Notre-Dame de Paris burned down on April 15, 2019, some saw it as more than a fire: it was a fact of civilization. If the cathedral burned down, they said to themselves, it was because something was definitely wrong in our beautiful country, threatened by the flames of decadence and saved by an elite of warriors of light. In short, it is still and always a question of projecting a vision of the world onto an event, which always says more about those who talk about it than about the state of the fire alarm of the jewels of the Centre des Monuments Nationaux (on February 5, 2019, ten people died in a fire started by an unbalanced woman in the 16th arrondissement, which caused less discussion among editorialists).
Notre-Dame is burning seeks to make this event a cinematic fact, by transforming it into a spiritual (saving a sacred place) and civilizational (saving a French place that calls for the universal) fight. This is not a critical exaggeration on our part, it is indeed what the film says and shows – which we will certainly not reproach for wanting to transform a dramatic event into a great popular film, let's be clear. But deep down, whether all this really happened like this matters little: it is first and foremost a question of making a good fiction film. And in this respect, it is not particularly successful.
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Exciting and tense as Jean-Jacques Annaud follows the firefighters as close as possible to the fire, clearly showing the fear, the pain, the heat, and the difficulty of progressing in the face of the blaze, Notre-Dame is burning completely unscrews on the writing side. Despite the presence of an experienced screenwriter (Thomas Bidegain, author at his best ofA prophet Or The Cowboys) in the script, nothing seems credible. The security guard who holds the phone a meter from his ear when his wife scolds him for staying late at work, the Christ-like apparition of a chaplain saving the hosts from the flames (and blessing in passing a young firefighter of Maghrebi origin impressed by the courage of the padre), Trump (played by a lookalike filmed from behind) tweeting from the White House, Anne Hidalgo (in her own role and her own office) seeing the flames from her window, the running gag of the old lady calling the firefighters to save her little cat stuck on a roof while the switchboard explodes… All this evokes the (bad) comic strip, a cinema of frozen panels, of cut-out, isolated and often absurd vignettes. In a few words: flashes of technical bravery drowned in a true story scattered, fragmented, with both burlesque and godly accents.
The script nevertheless serves up seeds of heroes (the security guard who is on his first day during the fire, young firefighters during their -literal- baptism of fire) with great cinematic potential, but which we will quickly lose interest in. Stalingradone of the best Annauds, absolutely distorted historical reality, and it was necessary since it was done for the benefit of fiction and action. Perhaps because of the proximity of the event, Notre-Dame is burning does not want to distort anything (the film is full of real images shot by spectators of the event, contributing to the fragmentation of the story and its lack of guiding force). And therefore, not that of fiction: the film seriously contextualizes the event, recalling that Emmanuel Macron was to give a speech on the Yellow Vests that evening (an excerpt from a news report recalls that “The five-year term is being played out tonight”), and the fire at the cathedral turned everything upside down. But this is also a blind spot in the film, remaining on the inconsistency of the president who was sidelined in the decision-making chain, thanks to the firefighters who set up a fake command post for him so that he would leave the firefighters alone – and it is one of the best scenes in the film. Perhaps, deep down, the film is also far too short to be able to evoke everything it wants – the France of the Yellow Vests, the firefighters' fight, the interconnected world where the slightest drama is scattered and dislocated in the chaos of the networks… Or perhaps, deep down, the Notre-Dame drama was not as dramatic or interesting as we are led to believe.
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