At The Movies: Haunting ghost story Ring Wandering; Notre-Dame On Fire reconstructs fateful day of fire

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110 minutes, opens on Thursday

3 stars

The story: The Notre-Dame of Paris was engulfed in flames on April 15, 2019. French film-maker Jean-Jacques Annaud incorporates actual footage in a dramatisation of the massive operation to rescue the 850-year-old cathedral.

Was it a careless cigarette? Or faulty wiring?

Whatever the cause, the cathedral’s alarm sounded during Easter Monday mass and was dismissed after an inspection of the sacristy – when it was the attic that had caught fire. The Paris Fire Brigade was not alerted until half-hour later, then further delayed by traffic.

Notre-Dame On Fire reconstructs, minute-by-minute, the events of the day beginning with these mishaps that would be farcical had they not converged inevitably towards the dreadful conflagration.

The movie is an Imax disaster adventure in a 1,200 deg C hellfire. The firefighters, the heroes of the story, battle the sizzling embers, blazing beams, stone gargoyles belching molten lead and a collapsing spire to tame the inferno and salvage the relics.

The 1986 mediaeval mystery The Name Of The Rose was Annaud’s international breakthrough, pre-dating The Lover (1992) and Seven Years In Tibet (1997). The director’s appreciation for gothic architecture, and his spatial clarity as rescuers wend their way along spiral stairs 50cm narrow, add greatly to the narrative urgency.

But his docu-drama remains an uneasy mix. The realism of the newsreels and amateur videos come up constantly against his contrived screenplay.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s cameo among all the acted characters is, for the record, genuine. So, too, are the touching scenes of tearful crowds gathered by the Seine in hymn and prayer for Our Lady of Paris.

Hot take: Can any feature film, even one by a veteran director, recreate fully the horror of such a catastrophe?

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