I’m pleased to see The Great Arch released more widely across the country, at least for a limited time.  I saw it in April as part of the closing days of the French Film Festival and have been surprised by how much it’s stuck with me.  It delves into an interesting true story, but its larger impact is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between art and politics.

At a time when many governments around the world are operating at significant budget deficits, how do we find the balance between cost constraint and artistic beauty?  If building new roads, stadiums, museums and buildings, how much extra are we prepared to spend to add visual flourishes?  The new Glasshouse Theatre at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre has a huge façade featuring “rippling” glass.  It looks super cool, but it clearly came at a higher cost than a simple cement wall to match the building’s existing brutalist nature.

Drawing from a recent novel, The Great Arch takes us back to 1982 when French President François Mitterrand launched a design contest to construct an iconic building in Paris’s business district.  The competition was won by Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, a largely unknown Danish architect who had the idea of creating a hollow “cube” with a width, height and depth of roughly 110 metres.  There are parallels with our own Sydney Opera House in that they were both wildly adventurous projects spearheaded by Danish designers.

Written and directed by Stéphane Demoustier (The Girl with the Bracelet), the film highlights the tensions that developed between Spreckelsen and government officials, including President Mitterrand.  On one hand, I admired the boldness and brilliance of the building’s design and wished it had been completed as intended for the world to admire.  On the other hand, I could also see Spreckelsen was an over-the-top perfectionist who became his own worst enemy when refusing to compromise on a ballooning price tag.  Claes Bang (The Square) is terrific in illustrating the character’s strengths and weaknesses.

Likely to inspire more reading on the subject, The Great Arch is a great view.