Notre-Dame on Fire

2nd viewing:

Notre Dame on Fire is like my life flashing before my eyes: it holds up after a re-watch.

The exposition is still handled with all of the grace of the Pope lighting his farts, but the explanation and recreation of the time-line is fascinating and very well made.

This movie is like the Paris métro: so much better when the aren't people in it.

Look, let's get this out of the way right from the beginning: if there is a scene in this movie with people in it, it's not going to be good. There will either be a problem with the script, with the actor, or the director who's trying too hard to make _Notre Dame de Titanic_ but just ends up with the cinematic equivalent of duck à l'orange with ketchup instead of l'orange.

So why did I love this movie so much? Because, dear reader, me and my over-sensitive ass were moved by these images -- some fabricated but some real -- of Notre Dame nearly burning to the ground.

Not because I love religion, mind you, but because I love Paris, and Notre Dame is as much a symbol of the city as the Eiffel Tower.

So, as a Parisian, I loved this movie for what it taught me about the fire and, especially what it showed me about the fire because _Notre Dame is Burning_ was filmed in IMAX to capture every aspect of the horrible spectacle.

In addition to the quality of the images, I I liked how Annaud would split the screen and show actual footage from that evening spliced beside close-up dramatizations of what was going on inside the building at that precise moment.

While I didn't like the way he directed humans, the two characters that really made this film work for me were the fire and the cathedral herself. If only Annaud had stepped back and filmed their story rather than dousing their energy with forced melodrama and dampening their presence with that of dubious actors.

Like a new lover, I'm able to overlook the film's flaws, blinded as I am by my passion for the city that houses Notre Dame. I'm also completely aware that those who don't share my affinity for the city will justifiably pick apart this film like a man with his best friend's girlfriend. But for those who recognize the place that Notre Dame holds in Paris, this film is burning with a passion that no man can completely extinguish.

(Don't worry, I'm going to see it again and I'll probably hate it)

It is mostly an action film, the novelization of the event, with little documentary content, but a film that would glue the audience to the screen due to the very high pace of the narration.

A docufiction that conveys a strange feeling, like a movie that isn't quite as spectacular as it claims, and a documentary that only partially explains the facts. It is a risky decision of Jean-Jacques Annaud, but it falls somewhere in the middle that leaves it bereft of authentic emotion: it doesn't have the expressions of reality but neither does it have the emotional resources of fiction. It's clearly a tribute to the firefighters who were involved in putting out the fire, but it seems to lack context.