The Great Arch (2025)

Johan Otto von Spreckelsen described his winning design for La Défense as an open cube, a window onto the world. The film’s French title, L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche, names him for what he was to most of Paris: the unknown man behind the arch. Stéphane Demoustier sets out to change that. His film amused me in places and elsewhere sent my eyes to the clock.

The year is 1983. François Mitterrand (Michel Fau) has launched an international competition for the monument meant to crown his presidency, and the jury’s choice startles nearly everyone. Spreckelsen (Claes Bang) teaches architecture in Copenhagen, has built little beyond his own house and four Danish churches, and speaks no French. He arrives in Paris with his wife, Liv (Sidse Babett Knudsen), carrying a design he regards as complete. The French state regards it as an opening offer. Most of the film’s 104 minutes unfold in the gap between those two positions.

Bang learned his French lines without speaking the language, which suits the part, since neither did the man he plays. He conveys the outsider’s bewilderment without pleading for sympathy; his Spreckelsen hears out translated objections with the courteous stillness of a man who has stopped expecting to be understood, and that stillness supplies most of the laughs. Xavier Dolan gives him a good sparring partner in Jean-Louis Subilon, the technocrat charged with steering the project, who backs the Dane but answers to ministers. Their scenes have a dry comic snap.

Then come the meetings. Demoustier stages the arch’s progress as a long sequence of conversations about cost, cladding, schedules, and who will answer to whom once the government changes, and he films nearly all of them at the same measured tempo. David Chambille’s camera stays composed and orderly, a sensible choice for a story about geometry, yet nothing in the cutting ever leans forward. I admired the discipline in principle. In practice, by the fourth discussion of budgets I could have scripted myself, my patience had started to thin.

The film’s subject is the price of refusing to compromise, and here it runs into a contradiction it never resolves. Spreckelsen wants his cube pure, with no concessions to cost or convenience, yet Demoustier tells the story in a register of careful, reasonable moderation, the very register the bureaucrats speak in. At its best that tension works as irony: the camera’s patience mirrors the state’s, and we watch the architect lose ground to people who never raise their voices. More often it drains the stakes. We’re told this building means more to him than almost anything, but the film seldom lets that obsession show on screen, so his stubbornness reads as temperament where it should read as conviction. I came out understanding his position far better than I felt it.

None of this makes The Great Arch a chore. Anyone curious about architecture, or about how a grand public project gets pulled apart by committee, will find enough here to justify an evening, and Bang’s performance repays the patience the pacing asks for. Go in patient, though. Viewers wanting a drama with more urgency should look elsewhere.