Notre Dame on Fire: Too soon

Here’s a strange one: a very old-school disaster movie composed from careful historical recreations, a degree of dramatic licence and one Tweet from Donald Trump.

Veteran director Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Name of the Rose) set to work on dramatising the 2019 fire of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, months after the fateful fire that collapsed the 13th-century building’s spire.

The film, scripted by the director and his regular co-writer Thomas Bidegain preserves a ripped-from-the-headlines feel with a series of carefully curated archival clips, rolling news commentary and an appearance by the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, as herself.

Chekhovian devices have seldom been employed so freely as they are in the opening sequences of this engaging, hour-by-hour chronicle of April 15th, 2019. Watch out, it’s an ominous cigarette break under a No Smoking sign. Oh no, it’s a portentous pigeon pecking at electrical wires. A lovely sweep of tour guides and their groups introduces — in various languages — the conflagration of the title (with Bourges Cathedral standing in for the real thing. Special details include the timber beams taken from trees that were growing while Charlemagne was alive and such notable artefacts as the Crown of Thorns.

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Firefighters valiantly struggle to save the rose windows and a purported fragment of the Holy Cross and nail. A security guard has a frantic first day. The cathedral’s director comically tries to return to the site from a function in Versailles. Onlookers sing hymns.

The urgency of the project ironically detracts from the drama. The story is simply too recent and too fresh to yield any surprises on the big screen. The characters appear mostly fleetingly and without time and space for development. This is precisely why the genre demands recognisable faces with baggage.

The ensemble here is perfectly professional, but nothing says disaster quite like such slanted cast pairings as Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche (Volcano), Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters (The Poseidon Adventure), or Paul Newman and OJ Simpson (The Towering Inferno).