Notre Dame on Fire ★★★
THE fire that destroyed a large section of Paris’s Notre-Dame cathedral provided significant challenges for the first responders.
Not only did they face having to work in highly susceptible and restricted-entry areas, they also had to save as many important religious artefacts as possible.
The latter meant finding their way into heavily secured areas under extreme circumstances.
Notre Dame on Fire is director and co-writer Jean-Jacques Annaud’s tribute to the fire crews and cathedral staff who risked their lives during the disaster that played out on 15 April 2019.
As the film depicts, the emergency response was impacted negatively from the very start.
Initially the fire was discounted as one of the routine false alarms caused by the historic old building’s antiquated wiring and safety systems.
By the time cathedral staff properly reacted to the situation, the fire had well and truly engulfed a remote and highly inaccessible section.
Members of the public were watching fire billow from the top of the building before fire services had even been formally requested to respond.
The busy streets of Paris, particularly around the popular tourist attraction, further impacted the ability to get the equipment required into place.
Many parts of the cathedral were quickly engulfed by fire, making the wooden floors and ceilings a major obstacle because they could collapse at any moment.
And simple things like getting keys to enter doors, rather than usually breaking them down, also proved highly problematic.
Annaud’s film meticulously depicts all these factors and his actors play their parts in a manner that rarely pushes the film into the types of familiar tropes of disaster films.
The technical teams do an excellent job of marrying the fire special effects within the location of a similar cathedral.
And the use of archival footage does not look out of place as it can do in similar films.
It’s no emotional rollercoaster; just an expertly made record of the amazing attempts to save an important piece of history.