Notre Dame (2019)

(In French, On TV, August 2021) On paper, there’s something interesting about Notre Dame and its premise — a neurotic architect with plenty of personal issues is selected as the winner of a national contest to shape the parvis of the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral. (Because you’re wondering: The film’s production preceded the devastating April 2019 fire even if the film’s release didn’t.)  But there’s a severe tonal unity problem that goes on to plague the rest of the film, as well as many exasperating choices made along the way. Never quite figuring out whether it wants to be an absurd farce, a piece of magical realism, a relationship drama, a character study, a social critique or a media satire, Notre Dame and its writer-director Valérie Donzelli both careen from one extreme to the other, never quite smoothing out the transitions through a solid core or a controlled screenplay. It plays like a series of scenes somehow starring the same actors with the same character names, but not really belonging in the same film. Some bits play out like excerpts from Amélie de Montmartre, some other bits revel in complicated relationship issues, second-act bits go for dumb social-media outrage and the end attempts legal farce, only to fall flat on its face, even in-universe. It makes for an exasperating film that wastes whatever it has at its disposal, with some curious choices (one of the teenage actors was just immediately unlikable) creating additional complications. There are a few good moments, but it would be nice if they belong to a coherent whole. Heck, there’s even a narrator that suddenly pops up well into the film and suggests yet another potentially-unifying layer that quickly goes nowhere. I suspect that most viewers will be interested to the film for the glimpses of a pre-catastrophe cathedral, but everyone should be warned — the building deserved far better than this film.