French Film Festival 2025
Based on the 2016 novel by Laurence Cossé, la Grande Arche, this latest film from director Stéphane Démoustier, tells the largely unknown story surrounding the architect of the now iconic Grande Arche de la Défense in Paris.
In anticipation of the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989, the then President, François Mitterrand (Michel Fau), has opened a competition to find the best design for a visionary arch that will be in the business area of la Défense and has to be seen at the end of the continuum of the grand route from Place de la Concorde via the Champs Élysées to l’Arc de Triomphe. When the winner of prestigious project is announced as a man called Otto von Spreckelsen (Claes Bang), whose name announces his not being French, the reaction caught by the assembled group in the Presidential palace is comically observed.
Jean-Louis Subilon (Xavier Dolan), the urban planner working closely with Mitterand, learns from the Danish consulate that Spreckelsen is an unknown (hence the film’s original French title) who had sent his application independently. It transpires that he is a teacher of architecture with only his own house and 4 churches to his credit yet he finds himself with the heavy responsibility of making an important architectural statement for French posterity with his design of what he calls the Cube.
What follows is the tension that arises immediately between practicalities of the design’s construction within French laws and Spreckelsen’s precious idealised vision. We are shown a man who prefers hand drawing to computer projections, who is strong to the point of being recalcitrant on maintaining his ideal to the last detail and in doing so keeping obstinate control. But his unwillingness to compromise, encouraged in the film by his wife Livi, played by Danish actress Sidse Babett Knudsen who’s best known to UK audiences for her lead role in the popular TV series Borgen, proves to be his downfall.
Fellow architect Paul Andreu (Swann Arlaud) becomes the Project Manager, in itself a compromise, but never quite convinces Spreckelsen that embracing modernity is necessary for practical reasons of the vast undertaking by the French Government to meet its culturally important deadline. The differing perspectives of the architect’s aesthetic versus the strong political and national statement being made for France results in an ultimately irreconcilable clash.
When, following an election, a new budget is introduced by a politician described as a ‘petty shopkeeper,’ the State has to step away although the French President retains his support for the Danish architect. His ideal of using the Carrara marble that made Michelangelo’s Pietà but was replaced by a more affordable option may have helped Spreckelsen’s decision to resign, putting his personal life before his professional one.
Recreations of the construction of what is a magnificent modern structure is quite astonishing (more convincing than the film’s cast of non-smoking smokers!) in this fascinating revelation of a little-known Danish man who played a part in French history but sadly died before the completion of la Grande Arche de la Défense that was inaugurated timeously on 14th July 1989.
Running time: 105 mins
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 