THE STORY – A Danish architect unexpectedly wins a French contest to design a building in Paris in the 1980s.
THE CAST – Claes Bang, Sidse Babett Knudsen & Xavier Dolan
THE TEAM – Stéphane Demoustier (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 105 minutes
Having debuted in 2014 with tennis-based comedy-drama “40-Love,” French filmmaker Stéphane Demoustier has since shown a fair amount of versatility, moving from one genre to the next with each successive project. For his fourth feature-length film, “The Great Arch,” he has chosen to tell a true story (albeit with at least one explicitly fictional element, as per the opening disclaimer), one that sort of comes across as a funnier take on topics of architecture and artistic integrity as seen in something like “The Brutalist” (complete with one shared key location). While Brady Corbet’s work is a 70mm extravaganza, Demoustier’s screens are in a 4:3 format, reflecting the shape of the titular monument.
In fact, the international title omits a key element, as the original “L’inconnu de la Grande Arche” (which translates to “The Unknown of the Great Arch”) highlights the human factor behind the monument: this is the story of Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, the Danish architect who, to everyone’s surprise, wins a contest to design what eventually became the Grande Arche, a vital part of President François Mitterrand’s plan to add a modern flair to the Parisian landscape. Most surprising is the fact that pretty much no one had ever heard of him. Spreckelsen, in his early 50s at the time, was primarily an architecture teacher and claimed with great modesty to have built nothing except his own house and a handful of churches back in Denmark.
As we meet him in the film, he’s therefore thrust into the spotlight and tasked with bringing Mitterrand’s ambition to life. The deadline is a bit tight, however, as the President wants the Arch (or Cube, as Spreckelsen calls it) to be ready in time for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution on July 14, 1989. And the main problem is arguably Spreckelsen himself, who insists that certain demands be followed to the letter despite their apparent impracticality in the eyes of his associate Paul Andreu and Mitterrand’s envoy Louis Subilon, who worries mainly about the financial aspect. Moreover, the architect’s relentless quest for control over the project starts driving a wedge between him and his wife.
The latter subplot is the main artistic license taken by Demoustier, perhaps to add some drama to what is overall a very funny movie (even though the real story comes with enough seriousness in the back half of the narrative and doesn’t really require this contrivance). It also gives star Claes Bang someone to trade barbs with in his native tongue. Sidse Babett Knudsen is on fire for the duration of her screen time while also helping the director inject more layers of humor into the “fish out of water” scenario. For while Spreckelsen does get along in French, he requires his wife to translate at times, which is true of the actors as well. Knudsen speaks the language fluently and has already acted in French productions, while Bang’s line deliveries always come with a bit of hesitation.
This informs Bang’s performance in a meaningful way and creates an interesting contrast with his international breakthrough performance in Ruben Östlund’s “The Square” (Demoustier jokingly referred to his leading man as the “best geometric actor in the world” at the premiere). There, while surrounded by Swedes, he always felt comfortable expressing himself in Danish, due to the (not very factual) mutual intelligibility between Scandinavian languages. Here, in a much more alien and at times subtly hostile context, his characterization of Spreckelsen gets increasingly warmer as he switches from French to English and then to his mother tongue.
On the supporting side, Swann Arlaud as Andreu does a great job balancing his role as a team player with the character’s occasional frustration at being seen as an underling when he is, in fact, Spreckelsen’s equal (something the Dane himself acknowledges when they first meet). Comedian and character actor Michel Fau – who has worked with François Ozon and also collaborated with Demoustier in the past – brings great comic energy as Mitterrand. His performance is broad enough to work on a universal level, but also – judging from the reactions at the screening this writer attended – sufficiently rooted in the French political reality of the time to deliver some jokes that cater to the national audience (at least one sight gag is also unlikely to elicit laughs from viewers who do not know Paris well).
And then, as Subilon, there’s Canadian director and actor Xavier Dolan who, after deciding to take a break from filmmaking, has increased his presence in front of the camera, as well as a voice actor/dubber in his native country (most recently, he was dubbed Timothée Chalamet in “Wonka” and both “Dune” movies for the French-language Canadian market). No stranger to roles in standard French, he still shows great confidence and exquisite timing as he delights in every syllable that emerges from Subilon’s bureaucratically minded mouth, having perhaps found a new calling as a supporting funnyman.
When all of these actors come together to form the ensemble that Demoustier has constructed as meticulously as Spreckelsen plans his Arch, the film truly soars, with a consistent laugh rate that’s nevertheless imbued with clever melancholy as the creative dilemma at the story’s core gets the respect it deserves. In that sense, the film is both a monument (pun not intended) to a great and perhaps overlooked visionary and a funny indictment of the system that wanted him to do his thing but not too much of it.
