Arde Notre Dame

A reenactment of the 2019 national disaster where Notre-Dame, a symbol of Paris, burned down. Jean Jacques Annaud is an experienced director, though it must be admitted that his best years were two decades ago, but this he chose a rather attractive subject matter that begged for a film treatment, even if he took his own way of doing it, and that didn't sit well with me. There's no main character, so there's nobody to root for, and the film lacks any emotion because of it, which is a pretty major problem. It's shot in a modest way, it looks quite made-for-TV at times, but that didn't detract significantly. The beginning of the disaster itself is handled decently and there is definitely a high level of negligence on the part of the workers. Something like this could definitely have been avoided with the right attitude. The running time could have been shorter, watching firefighters put out a fire for an hour gets a little tiresome, especially when there's no one there to yell. It should probably be seen, but I can't say that I enjoyed watching it. 5/10 (04.09.2022)

Top-notch work with the blending of archival and staged footage, and a fierce montage most of the time, which exhausts you all the more in the right way as it thickens the action and puts new obstacles that take away the most precious thing: time. Annaud more or less ignores poetic insertions and, apart from the necessary emphasis on the immeasurable significance of Notre-Dame (religious through the relics present, national through the president present or architectural, which is explained by the guides in the introduction), he opts for an almost documentary realistic form, without any clichés, last-minute rescues, or heroic self-sacrifice. The firefighters represent a rather anonymous and dedicated workforce facing the biggest challenge of their careers, and Annaud manages to make sure the audience fully understands the importance of their mission. At several moments I was tense as a string, and perhaps it's just a pity about the finale, when the intensity lets up at the expense of a sensitive multiperspective experience. A top-notch catastrophe movie, the likes of which are hardly ever made anymore, with an experienced filmmaker who knows how to observe events objectively, not to force the audience into certain emotions and interpretations. The fifth star is not very far. 85 % (21.04.2022)

Esto salió muy bien. Arde Notre Dame deleita con un enfoque cinematográfico agradablemente civil, en el que ninguno de los personajes es «el principal» y todos se limitan a cumplir su papel en un entramado procesal de acciones y reacciones dentro de un hecho real. Y la mayor parte está rodada de forma impresionante. Los efectos especiales están a tal nivel que su inclusión se funde perfectamente con el metraje real utilizado y apenas se nota la transición entre ellos. Eso no se ve muy a menudo. (10.09.2022)

The Notre-Dame fire is undoubtedly one of the most significant events in French history in recent years. Three years ago, it was not only a cathedral that burned down, but also one of the symbols of Paris, France and perhaps even of Europe. On the verge of his 80th birthday, Jean-Jacques Annaud takes on this (literally) searing story and made a film with both fiction and archival footage that presents this infamous event quite faithfully, but without getting into any unnecessary narrative around it. Everything centers on the cathedral, the devastating fire, the determination of the firefighters and their race against time. I was initially a little distracted by the embedded archive footage and there were a few 'weird' scenes that didn't need to be in the film, but it's still a solid drama with a strong documentary feel and more than one suspenseful scene. (24.04.2022)

Well, in essence, there was nothing to be done with it since the Notre Dame fire is a completely unrewarding situation cinematically. Everyone was evacuated in time, everyone was more or less unhurt, it was caused by a boring technical error, we all saw it from every angle in a first row seat, and it took place sometime in the early evening, so there was no time to forget that there wasn't actually any real drama. Not to mention, of course, the iconicity of the scene itself. But is that iconicity capable of wrapping an entire movie around itself? Uhhh, It's hard to say, Berg might have given it a go, but dude really, really, not a completely, but completely worn out Annaud. He probably simply realized that there's nothing to take from this, so he overwhelmed the film with absolutely awful mini-anecdotes about a frightened young fireman, a faithful young girl lighting a candle, a dramatic security guard hypnotizing a yellow button, a priest falling to his knees, and a spontaneously singing crowd under the cathedral, convincingly gazed upon with emotion and conviction by a fireman exhausted from the fire in the tower. The degree of cringe here is comparable to that famous subway scene in Wright's Darkest Hour, only stretched out to the length of the entire film. The filmmaker's cluelessness (culminating in a final shot of the firefighter putting out the fire, which is just a dramatic un-zooming and re-zooming of the camera on his face until the music ends) is then cemented by a soundtrack so epic that it feels like it's from a music bank, which is also revealed quite often by the fact that it's mostly pretty poorly used and tries to create epic scenes out of practically nothing. I normally reserve my boo! rating for films that somehow offend me personally, because I didn't think there was anything that was simply so poorly made that it wasn't also entertaining, thus forming an intersection between the poles of quality/non-quality. But Notre-Dame on Fire is truly just the worst kind of schlock movie where even death doesn't take (literally). Annaud's descendants should make sure that no one ever gets to see the films of his late period again. (19.07.2022)