The Great Arch

Stéphane Demoustier adapted Laurence Cossé's 2016 novel La Grande Arche and premiered the result in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2025. The subject is the true and quietly devastating story of Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, the Danish architect whose design won Mitterrand's competition for a monument at La Défense in 1983 and who never saw it finished.

Claes Bang plays von Spreckelsen as a man of absolute conviction and no political instinct at all, dropped into a French state project with its own arithmetic; Swann Arlaud is Paul Andreu, the engineer assigned to make it buildable, and Xavier Dolan appears as a ministerial adviser. Sidse Babett Knudsen plays his wife Liv. Demoustier keeps the register procedural — meetings, drawings, budget revisions — and lets the scale of the thing accumulate behind the paperwork.

It belongs to the small genre of films about what institutions do to people who make things, and its subject rhymes with the catalogue's other recent French entries about work and compromise. At 104 minutes it is precise rather than epic, which is the correct choice: the monument is enormous, the story is about a man being ground down in offices.