Notre-Dame on Fire film review — tragedy meets farce in dramatised disaster

What if Marx was only half right, and history can be tragedy and farce together? The blaze that engulfed Notre-Dame de Paris in April 2019 was ruinous: the spire and most of the roof were destroyed. Yet miraculously, no one was killed. And so in the dramatisation Notre-Dame on Fire, fate and human error conspire to create something not always unlike comic effect. Leaks turn hoses into water pistols; keys are mixed up and safe codes forgotten, holy relics rescued then found to be replicas. Stranded across Paris, a desperate curator tries to make it back on a string of malfunctioning bicycles. Check the credits. Has the ghost of that great clown-genius Jacques Tati slipped behind the camera?

In fact, the director is veteran Jean-Jacques Annaud. Every mishap comes from the record. Take the film as a bookend to one of his signature movies, The Name of the Rose, the 14th-century murder mystery set among Franciscan monks. Now the first minutes of his new film find medieval cathedral life multitasking in 2019: a storehouse of Christian artefacts, emotive hub of national identity and endlessly whirring tourist attraction. A workplace too, thick with ecclesial support staff and builders already engaged in a renovation.

Come for the whodunnit but — spoiler warning — the official open verdict remains, a stray cigarette or blown electrics each plausible first sparks. Still, the rest is pieced together with the remorseless logic of a good detective story. In dialogue scenes, the film can feel as stiff as a Crimewatch reconstruction, as if the professional cast were aiming for the awkwardness of non-professional actors.

But as the fire takes hold, Annaud gives the action a dreadful, compelling momentum, driven by a cool grasp of the architecture. From the ignited attic, it makes clear spatial sense that these aged beams burn next. And then that a ring of hellfire would drip into the nave below. Is that rain outside? Not quite. The furnace cooks the lead off the roof. Molten metal streams over the gargoyles, spattering the 4th arrondissement.

Doing this stuff properly is harder than it looks. If the talking is a weak spot, Annaud knows storytelling well enough to keep passing through the characters. The first is a low-ranking security guard on his first day in the job. Regular punctuation comes with the bumbling flight of that hapless curator through a stunned, gridlocked Paris. (He is played by Mickaël Chirinian; the energy is pure Stanley Tucci.) But eventually there are just the firefighters, the scaffolding around the church soon turned red-hot. Should it buckle, fin.

Full disclosure: I saw the film in the perfect setting, on the big screen at London’s Ciné Lumière among French expats for whom revisiting the unthinkable brought palpable shivers. Watch on a laptop at your peril. The smaller the screen, the damper the squib. (The actual French audience may not be available at all venues.)

Archive clips of live TV artfully fold into Annaud’s reconstruction. Enter a grim-faced Emmanuel Macron. Watching Notre-Dame on Fire, you can see the blaze as loaded with metaphor. Many did at the time: an ancient symbol of the French soul, set to collapse. Annaud makes room for the literal too. On the night of the fire, Macron was due to address the protests of the gilets jaunes. Now the film finds an ordinary firefighter breaking ranks to propose the approach that finally quells the pyre.

There is no rousing speech. In the end, efficiency is heroic enough. That much suits the film: a sturdy disaster movie made for the pocket change of €20mn by a wily old hand of a director. The downbeat mood fits our torrid midsummer too — the film now released in the UK with Britain and France both alight with still more ominous flames.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from July 22