Running TimeHere’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 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 , Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters , or Paul Newman and OJ Simpson .
What?