Notre-Dame in Flammen

Between the report and the reconstruction, the movie by Jean-Jacques Annaud is excellent. The only extra-production thing that makes a stain is that we collect hundreds of millions to rebuild what has been destroyed and we can't find a hundred cents to give to the unfortunate. A crazy world.

Apart from the very well done fire reenactments, I feel like I've been watching a slow amateur film with commercials for the Paris fire department. It's so poorly acted that I thought it was replayed by the firefighters themselves before I realized it wasn't.

Based on the real 2019 Notre-Dame de Paris fire. A kind of Louis de Funes movie, but with firefighters, not gendarmes. Not very accurate, despite using some archive footage from the real events.

It shows the French as incompetent and out-of-reality people, lacking all interests about doing things properly. It intended to show the Paris Fire Brigade in a good light, as working hard heroes, but in fact it portrait them as slackers, a "fake it till you make it" command, more interested in being ultra religious, braving in a humoristic and ridiculous way.

A film comparable at most with hollywoodian disaster movies.

And real and very good. This movie relates the fire in the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris in April 2019. And does it with an extremely good editing, articulating and combining real actual scenes (even President Macron appears once) with fiction ones in such a realist sequence that we when watchibg it, feel like if we were there present side by side with intervenients. It is to follow the work of firemen and other responsible persons doing evrything possible to extinguish the fire. A fascinating and surprising movie.

On the one hand, it's very interesting how this film is almost devoid of a personal history or development of the characters. Also there is are no real main roles at all. On the other hand, it's what's missing to make it entertaining. So we see a lot of rescue workers who don't really know what to do, a city population that ignores and hinders the rescue workers and an 800 years old cathedral that almost burns down completely.

Not so exciting, because apart from the tragedy of the destruction, nothing special happens. No special event shown or a known reason is told for this catastrophy that answers our only question: why this happened? ... like in millions of other fires where old buildings simply start burning for seemingly no reason. But is this enough for a entertaining flick? I think not. Not if it's not artfully staged and it isn't. Sometimes you even think you're watching a B-movie.

A real documentary would have been more exciting than an entertainment film without a real story that doesn't know what it's supposed to be.