Notre-Dame in Flammen

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)

Es ist gelungen. Notre-Dame in Flammen erfreut angenehm mit zivilisierter filmischer Handhabung, bei der keine der Charaktere im Film "die Hauptheldin" ist und jeder nur seine Rolle in einem prozeduralen Netzwerk von Handlungen und Reaktionen im Rahmen einem realen Ereignis erfüllt. Und es ist vor allem sehr beeindruckend gefilmt. Die Spezialeffekte sind auf einem solchen Niveau, dass ihre Integration nahtlos mit den verwendeten realen Aufnahmen verschmilzt und der Übergang zwischen ihnen praktisch unbemerkt bleibt. Das sieht man selten. (10.09.2022)

Der Brand von Notre-Dame ist zweifellos einer der Meilensteine der französischen Geschichte der letzten Jahre. Vor drei Jahren brannte nicht nur eine Kathedrale ab, sondern auch eines der Symbole von Paris, Frankreich und vielleicht sogar Europa. Annaud, der bald seinen 80. Geburtstag feiert, hat sich dieser (im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes) heiklen Geschichte angenommen und einen Film mit Spiel- und Archivpassagen gedreht, der dieses unselige Ereignis recht getreu wiedergibt, ohne jedoch in eine unnötige Erzählung zu verfallen. Alles dreht sich um die Kathedrale, den verheerenden Brand, die Entschlossenheit der Feuerwehrleute und ihren Wettlauf mit der Zeit. Anfangs störte mich das eingefügte Archivmaterial ein wenig, und es gab ein paar "seltsame" Szenen, die nicht in den Film gehörten, aber es ist dennoch ein solides Drama mit einem starken dokumentarischen Charakter und mehr als einer spannenden Szene. (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)