To stage the fire of the Paris cathedral, Hervé Hadmar, the creator of the series, takes the risk of pure fiction and improbability.
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How to give birth to emotion by staging, in fictional mode, an event that everyone has already experienced live? The question arose on multiple times, about the attacks of September 11, 2001, for example. Five years after the collapse of the twin towers, two filmmakers responded very differently. While Paul Greanggrass gave the appearance of a documentary to the story of the diversion of the flight 93 of United Airlines (flight 93), Oliver Stone made the fate of a firefighter a mystical experience (World Trade Center). The material obliged the directors to navigate between the relationship of facts already known, the absence of suspense and the respect due to the thousands of victims.
The fire of Notre-Dame de Paris, on April 15, 2019, dispenses from this last constraint the candidates for fiction, since there were two wounded once the flames are turned off. It remains to revive an overabundance of spectacular images. From the first column of smoke to the last embers, including the fall of the arrow and the collapse of the frame, each moment was filmed from angles as numerous as there are information chains installed in Paris ( plus drones of the Ministry of the Interior), before being seen and revised on social networks.
braided with fireworks
The company first attracted Jean-Jacques Annaud, who, with the screenwriter Thomas Bidegain, tried a film devoid of pathos, and sometimes tinged with irony, Notre-Dame burns (2022), a bit to The way of Paul Greanggrass. The title of Annaud’s film, dry as an urgent AFP, contrasts with the emphasis of that of Notre-Dame, the part of the fire, Hervé Hadmar series (Creator, Director and Coscenarist with Olivier Bocquet), that Netflix puts online on October 19.
In the imagination of the Creator of the Forgotten (2008) and Pigalle, at night (2009), the fire becomes an order which decides on the fate of a handful of characters. Notre-Dame, the part of the fire may be a series, it returns to the rules of the choral film, invented in Hollywood in the time of Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932), and its descendant, the catastrophe film, including one Prototypes was the hellish tower (John Guillermin, 1974).
By deciding to forge some Parisian destinies to the fire of the cathedral, Hervé Hadmar turns very deliberately back to accuracy. It remained to preserve consistency and a form of likelihood. This is where the building vacillates. In the center of the story, there are firefighters, of course. A general who doubts (Roschdy Zem) after losing his son, himself a soldier of fire, in an explosion; A proactive colonelle (Caroline Proust), that her faith pushes to save at all costs the crown of thorns preserved in the sacristy, whose film of Annaud recalls that it was bought by Saint Louis at the price of financial health of the kingdom ; A neophyte (Megan Northam) who gets back as best he can of the explosion in which the general’s son perished.
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