Notre-Dame on Fire

7/28/2022

Just imagine. A builder on the roof of this ancient monument is having a fly cigarette. He throws the butt from the rooftop but instead of finding it's way to the ground, it is blown through one of the slitted windows whereupon it encounters some debris from a pigeon's nest and - well quite literally all hell breaks lose. Jean-Jacques Annaud intersperses real footage of this terrible conflagration with a drama offering us a plausible depiction of just how difficult it was for the Pompiers of Paris to not only tackle this blaze, but to get through the grid-locked streets of their city to the Île de la Cité in the first place. There is a palpable sense of the heat, the smoke - and the fear as the fire fighters tried to coax the water pressure into a meaningful tool to put out the fire whilst