You certainly remember where you were when Notre-Dame caught fire. I was in my room at the Sheraton in Damascus when Dora called me to let me know. I had just returned from a trip to Soueïda, in Druze country. Adnan, our guide in Bashar el-Assad’s country, had sworn to us that there had been scuffles the night before, but it was impossible to know more, except that the Daesh were in on it, and that there there had been a death. Sure he had told us that to scare us, to make the trip more thrilling. In any case, we hadn’t seen anything, and the war continued to elude us.
Barely showered, slumped in this last island of luxury in this country ravaged by war, I receive an SMS from Dora: “Chérii, Notre-Daaaame!!” I have a knack for never being where it’s happening. When Zidane’s header sent the ball into the Brazilian goal for the second time in the World Cup final, I was in Mexico. When the same head hit Materazzi’s chest, we were on the island of Madeira. On August 4, 2020, when Dora was shaken and blown away by the explosion in the port of Beirut, I was like a dick in Paris.
Suddenly, I no longer know where to go so that nothing happens. I probably should have gone to Kiev last week. At the risk of not attending Valérie Pécresse’s meeting at the Zénith. The worst is the World Trade Center. I was in the attic of the racing society, digging through the archives, my phone battery flat. When I got out of there, at 6 o’clock in the evening, I was only entitled to repeats.
HQ mirror and crown of thorns
So I was not going to miss this invitation to the preview of Notre Dame is burning. I discovered on this occasion the superpanoramic room of the Pathé Beaugrenelle, a screen commensurate with the drama, an armchair like a throne. It contrasts with the film, made of odds and ends, which is quite nice for a film with such a big budget. Between the reconstructions, the images taken by the mobile phones of onlookers on site, those of the televisions, those of the army, of the police, there is in particular this aerial shot of the cathedral on fire, shot with a drone, very impressive, except that at the bottom right of the image appears the logo of the air force, or of the police headquarters, I don’t know anymore, it’s weird, it brings us back less to reality than to the tenuousness of what separates it from fiction.
Moreover, initially, it was to be a documentary, and then over the course of their research the screenwriters discovered stories so crazy that the desire to reconstitute them in fiction was essential. I tell you two. You don’t blame me for “spoiling” the film for you since you know how it ends. First, the story of the crown of thorns. That of Christ. Not only did I not know she was there, in the cathedral, but I didn’t even know she existed. I saw it as a unicorn horn. Not at all ! When we see the rector archpriest of the cathedral on his knees on the sidewalk crying, praying to save this crown from the flames, we understand that Christ really had it on his head, with the drops of blood and all.
But the most extraordinary, the story which in itself would have been enough to make a film, is the “mirror HQ” trick. I explain to you. At the time of the fire, two generals of the Paris fire brigade were in charge of the operation called “What can we do?”. When the President of the Republic arrives on the spot, the two generals share the task: the first settles down with Macron, his court and a few accredited journalists in this famous mirror HQ, where he explains the situation to the head of the nation, while pretending to give orders to phantom firefighters, in short, he entertains the gallery, while 200 meters away the second general directs the operations, calmly, and for real. Fiction, reality, all go to hell, said Pirandello.