Writers: Laurence Cossé and Stéphane Demoustier
Director: Stéphane Demoustier
The architect of Paris’s La Grande Arche always referred to his building as The Cube. He also envisioned his design to be encased in sheets of bonded glass and decorated with Carrara marble from Italy, the same stone that Michelangelo used to carve his Pietà, which would turn pink as the sun set in the French capital. Johan Otto von Spreckelsen’s trials to retain control over his project are captured nicely in Stéphane Demoustier’s The Great Arch, which competed at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard category this year, but the film lacks the wonder of the monument itself.
No one had heard of Spreckelsen when he won the design competition to create a building that would commemorate the 200 years since the French Revolution. Demoustier’s film begins with the Danish architect’s name being called out by President Mitterrand, but the announcement is greeted with bemused silence. The President instructs his aide Jean-Louis Subilon to telephone the lucky architect, but all they have is a postal address. Even the Danish Embassy haven’t heard of Spreckelsen. Subilon has to travel to Denmark to track him down.
In his mid-50s, Spreckelsen has little experience in designing such grand projects. He’s built his own house and a handful of churches, but nothing of this scale. At first, the press delights in supporting such an underdog and Claes Bang’s Spreckelsen is shy and unassuming as he gives his interviews and then when he meets the President in a palace garden. The architect defers to Mitterrand’s odd requests, such as standing in the middle of the Champs-Élysées to imagine the panorama with a new monument in the distance.
But his lack of experience also weighs against him. He discovers that he is required to use a French construction firm to build The Cube and that French Health and Safety Regulations prohibit the kind of adhesive he needs to bond his glass so that there are no visible joins, and that lies completely flat. His project manager, French architect Paul Andreu, insists that a building evolves as it is constructed, that it changes slightly as problems with materials and sightlines emerge. But Spreckelsen proves to be inflexible.
Much of the change between greenhorn and rod of iron is triggered by the fictional character of Spreckelsen’s wife, who persuades her husband to demand 25 million francs as his fee, rather than the 2.5 million he was going to ask for. She’s present at almost every meeting he has with Subilon, and acts as his number two when he’s away scouting for marble. Only once do we see her suggesting to him that he needs to loosen his grip on the project.
Bang does well to chart Spreckelsen’s journey from excited naïf to tortured architect, and by the end of the film, the character is unsympathetically aloof and single-minded. Perhaps we, too, like Subilon and Andreu, are trained to trust in bureaucracy and respond to austerity measures. Bang smoothly navigates between Danish and French, although when he speaks English in the moments his French vocabulary fails him, his British accent is unnervingly authentic.
As Mitterrand, Michel Fau is pompous, suggesting that La Grande Arche is a vanity project more than a celebration of French virtues. Sidse Babett Knudsen is cold as Liv, the architect’s wife, but Swann Arlaud as the beleaguered Paul Andreu is tremendous in attempting to melt the iron-clad Spreckelsen to adapt to the many unforeseen challenges they meet.
Stéphane Demoustier’s film is full of the smoky rooms of the 1980s, and the mud of the foundation site is particularly grim. Paris doesn’t look so beautiful after all. However, despite the attention to detail, his film is surprisingly traditional and doesn’t take the risks that its subject did.
The Great Arch is screening at the French Film Festival London 2025 from 12 – 23 November.
