Notre-Dame brûle

French TOWERING INFERNO, but nearly fifty years later and involving Notre Dame instead of a gigantic tower building. As far as I know, that's the only and first French disaster film ever made; but maybe I am wrong. I have seen only forty thousand films in my life. It is truly a masterpiece, Jean Jacques Annaud lost nothing of his talent, his awesome skills, forty years after LA GUERRE DU FEU. It's fire war - GUERRE DU FEU - again.... It's as awesome as his first epic, back in 1981, which was about another topic of course. It is great, accurate, providing thousands of details about this disaster. Everything you wished to know about it, you have here. Except maybe the real reasons of the fire. Accidental? Maybe. Maybe. But never forget that president Macron was in a bad position in April 2019, bad political position, because of the Yellow Jackets "revolution" that spread all over France. And this tragedy over Notre Dame was the best decoy for him, to "help" people forgetting for a long while the Yellow Jackets wrath. That's my own opinion. An accident? Maybe. Maybe.

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.

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.

Notre Dame Brûle is a crying indictment to the entire system (or lack thereof) that was supposed to protect and preserve from the risk of fire one of the most ancient and beautiful monuments of the world.

How is it possible that the several tons of very old wood that made the roof of the cathedral were not equipped with an extensive state of the art anti fire system? Had any of the cathedral's curators ever took a stroll across what was called "the forest"? Had the idea of what a sparkle could do in such environment ever crossed their mind?

How is it possible that none of the curators ever felt the need to design and put in place a pre-defined plan of intervention that would allow an instantaneous deployment of the fire brigades in case of fire emergency?

How is it possible that no one ever thought it might be a good idea to invest into equipping the cathedral with a modern, reliable, pervasive fire alarm system?

How is it possible that so many of the cathedral's infrastructures, like the pipes supposed to carry the water to the roof, were completely decrepit and unusable?

All the polemics surrounding the crisis management after the fire were simply sterile: one hour after the roof caught fire, the cathedral was doomed, the fire was out of control. All was decided in those 60 minutes when all the outdated, failing systems in place did nothing to trigger a prompt response.

This is no hindsight: the hypothesis of a fire was (should have been) a very real one; but none of those in charge acted upon it.

If Notre Dame is still standing, despite the ineptness of its curators, it is thanks to the superior bravery of a bunch of fire brigades officers who put their lives at risk to go in and extinguish the fire in the left tower.

This incident however will remain a forever stain on France's credibility in its ability to protect its artistic patrimony.

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.