Claes Bang plays the Danish designer of Paris’s Grande Arche in a meticulous drama about artistic purity colliding with bureaucratic ego and national vanity

At first glance, Stéphane Demoustier’s new drama about the construction of Paris’s Arche de la Défense appears to belong to the recent run of what you might call French brand-heritage pictures, which include the likes of 2021’s Eiffel or 2023’s Widow Clicquot. But adapted from Laurence Cossé’s 2016 novel La Grande Arche, the film is not the story of a cultural triumph but rather the testimony of a failure, or at least a monumental botch-job, that spiritually crushed its Danish architect, Johan Otto von Spreckelsen (played here by Claes Bang).

In 1983, Von Spreckelsen was the unexpected winner of an international competition to design the statement building for the French capital’s western business district. He’s such an obscure name that the embassy in Denmark doesn’t even know who he is, leaving President Mitterrand’s adviser Jean-Louis Subilon (a toadying Xavier Dolan) to track him down while he’s fishing in a Danish lake. Summoned to France, this purist refuses to deviate from the perfect dimensions of his “Cube”, seeing it as the culmination of his life’s work. But he’s immediately caught between the pernickety caprices of the premier (Michel Fau) and the cost-cutting wiles of the technocrat Subilon.