Two significant films about architects are making their debut this week, offering audiences contrasting perspectives on the complex relationship between artistic vision and architectural reality. Stéphane Demoustier's "The Unknown of the Grande Arche" hits theaters Wednesday, while Brady Corbet's "The Brutalist" becomes available on video-on-demand, both examining the struggles of architects whose unwavering convictions clash with political and social realities.
Demoustier's film tells the fascinating story of the Grande Arche at La Défense, the massive cubic structure conceived and built during the 1980s. The project's designer called it simply "a cube," and everyone around him fell in step with this geometric vision. Intriguingly, when the film begins, it adopts a square 4:3 format that immediately mirrors the architectural project it describes. This presents what many consider the inherent danger of architect films – they often become device-films, geometry-films, structure-films where the stakes can weigh as heavily as concrete blocks.
The film opens with François Mitterrand, portrayed with notable flair by Michel Fau, standing at the center of the square frame surrounded by advisors as they contemplate the winning project's model. This massive structure would occupy the grand plaza at the entrance to La Défense district. When someone asks who the architect is, Mitterrand struggles to pronounce the name: Johan Otto Von Spreckelsen. Contacting him proves even more challenging – the Danish Embassy where he lives doesn't know him, and no one has his phone number.
The President's advisor in charge of the project must travel to Denmark, to the shores of a beautiful wild lake, to deliver the good news personally: Spreckelsen has won this prestigious competition and will work alongside a head of state passionate about architecture. Von Spreckelsen emerges as a complete outsider who has built only four churches and his own house, yet he possesses crystal-clear and unshakeable ideas about his cube that will soon collide with ambitions, petty politics, and changing political regimes.
This narrative of an unknown foreign architect with unwavering artistic convictions indeed recalls "The Brutalist," and the films share remarkably similar motifs. Both feature pivotal scenes in Italian marble quarries that profoundly move their protagonists, literally dazzling them and precipitating their destinies. However, Corbet's "The Brutalist" presents itself as an epic fresco linking the artist to the grand history of the 20th century with an almost overwhelming grandiloquence and demonstrative purpose that can feel heavy-handed. The film systematically attempts to match its formal research to its character's journey, falling into what critics call the formalist trap of architect films.
Demoustier skillfully avoids this pitfall with a film that, while more modest in appearance, tastefully blends multiple tones and genres. The story begins as a sharp political comedy, satirical without being snide, featuring Mitterrand/Fau in the role of an aesthetic monarch who is both funny and convincing. He visits construction sites recreated through sophisticated VFX – digitally reconstructed images that are beautiful beyond their technical prowess. These sequences allow viewers to see the grand plaza riddled with mud, then the first pillars of the great arch bristling with cranes and scaffolding.
The comedy notably shifts tone as the architect's melancholy and madness take hold. While one might regret this sudden gravity that borders on the serious portrait of a tortured artist, this tonal mixture arguably creates the film's entire beauty. The result is somewhat unsteady and impure – in short, not a cube, and that's for the better. This imperfection gives the film a humanity that pure geometric precision might have sacrificed, making it a more compelling exploration of the intersection between artistic vision and practical reality.
