If you happen to be tramping up the Champs Élysées in Paris on a bright summer’s day, you’ll likely see a strange square arch in the middle distance which, architecturally, sits apart from the ornate, careworn classicism that otherwise characterises the city. This is the Arche de la Défense, inaugurated in 1989 to mark the bicentennial of the French Revolution, and designed by the little-known Danish architect, Johan Otto von Spreckelsen.
Stéphane Demoustier’s The Great Arch tells the little-known story of von Spreckelsen, here played by Claes Bang, as he is named the unlikely winner of a competition to design the monument, and is duly ground down by the top-heavy bureaucracy of the French state. Yet he is presented from the off as an iconoclast, as no-one can find von Spreckelsen (or even knows who he is) to be able to alert him of the big news (he’s out fishing when Xavier Dolan’s toadying underling eventually locates him). He’s then spirited to Paris where he meets François Mitterand, who seems to be entirely on his side, and he makes it clear to there premier that the only way he’ll go ahead with the project is if everything is done on his exacting terms.
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The film premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and sits in the long, tall shadow cast by Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist when it comes to detailed psychological portraits of fastidious 20th century architects. The Great Arch is speckled with a little bit more humour in its depiction of the warring factions and the louche workings of the French government in the early 1980s, and Bang at least initially leans into von Spreckelsen’s innate eccentricity without making him seem like a parody.
Yet the film takes a dark twist in its final section when it becomes clear that many of the pathfinding architect’s colleagues are choosing the highway rather than his way. It’s a solid, well-made culture-clash drama that does manage to provide a little more insight and emotion than would come from scanning von Spreckelsen’s Wiki bio.