At first glance, Stéphane Demoustier’s new drama about the construction of Paris’s Arche de la Défense appears to belong to the recent run of what you might call French brand-heritage pictures, which include the likes of 2021’s Eiffel or 2023’s Widow Clicquot. But adapted from Laurence Cossé’s 2016 novel La Grande Arche, the film is not the story of a cultural triumph but rather the testimony of a failure, or at least a monumental botch-job, that spiritually crushed its Danish architect, Johan Otto von Spreckelsen (played here by Claes Bang).
In 1983, Von Spreckelsen was the unexpected winner of an international competition to design the statement building for the French capital’s western business district. He’s such an obscure name that the embassy in Denmark doesn’t even know who he is, leaving President Mitterrand’s adviser Jean-Louis Subilon (a toadying Xavier Dolan) to track him down while he’s fishing in a Danish lake. Summoned to France, this purist refuses to deviate from the perfect dimensions of his “Cube”, seeing it as the culmination of his life’s work. But he’s immediately caught between the pernickety caprices of the premier (Michel Fau) and the cost-cutting wiles of the technocrat Subilon.
Von Spreckelsen hires Paul Andreu (Anatomy of a Fall’s Swann Arlaud), designer of the futuristic Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle airport, as his site manager while insisting that artistic credit remains his. Demoustier contains this retro piece, like Pablo Larraín’s No, in a boxy 4:3 ratio and fastidiously details the architect’s battles, compromises and perceived betrayals; these include the glass facade, the suspended cloud form underneath the canopy, and the Carrara marble for which he enlists Mitterrand’s support. Even backed in his politicking by his wife, Liv (Sidse Babett Knudsen), Von Spreckelsen starts to cave in to paranoia and rage in the face of the interference.
While it is exact on the construction process, The Great Arch is less so on the man. Unlike Von Spreckelsen, Demoustier is reticent about his subject’s guiding lines – making the architect’s irritating intransigence obvious, but staying vague about the underlying emotional reasons, or Von Spreckelsen’s egotism (as the Carrara quarry owner says, even Michelangelo never invented anything). Anchoring this somewhat generic depiction of Tormented Architectural Genius, Bang goes with airy disdain rather than firebrand creativity, leaving him slightly unmoored from the heavyweight cast, which includes the always-shrewd Arlaud. But the crushingly downbeat ending is intriguing – a sobering exposé of the supposed Gallic cult of the artist.
• The Great Arch is at the Cine Lumière, London, from 11 March.
