At the Cannes Film Festival, an architect overwhelmed by his work in "The Stranger of the Grande Arche"

In 1983, when Stéphane Demoustier's film opens, President François Mitterrand entrusted von Spreckelsen, who had only built his house and a handful of churches, with the keys to this colossal project, which was to be completed for the bicentenary of the 1789 Revolution.

The surprise is complete, everyone mispronounces his name, no one can reach him. "Call the Danish embassy, ​​it's a small country, they'll be able to help you," says Mitterrand, the self-builder monarch played by Michel Fau in this film, screened in the Un Certain Regard section.

Revealed in "The Square", Palme d'Or 2017, the Danish actor Claes Bang lends his tall figure to this phlegmatic and stubborn von Spreckelsen, resistant to any concession despite the pressure of a presidential advisor (Xavier Dolan) and the wise suggestions of his executor (Swan Arlaud).

After Francis Ford Coppola's "The Brutalist" and "Megalopolis," his fiction places an architect at the center of the story who "only sees the world through his profession," Stéphane Demoustier ("Borgo," "The Girl with the Bracelet"...) explains to AFP.

"That he suffered so much in a process that should have been an accomplishment for him, it was touching to me," adds the 48-year-old filmmaker.

From the quality of the marble to the rendering of the glass walls, his quest for the absolute on the Grande Arche, which he alone called "the cube," would ultimately take its toll on his health. Having died in 1987, von Spreckelsen never saw his magnum opus standing.

“Dealing with reality”

"It touched me, this inability to deal with reality because, when we make films, we too are constantly grappling with these questions," the French director explains. "We have an idea and then the principles of reality catch up with us: the lack of money, the availability of locations."

Stéphane Demoustier also wanted to delve back into this era of large and expensive Mitterrand projects, which he likens to the "last flames of romanticism and French freedom."

At the time of the construction of the Grande Arche, the Louvre Pyramid was gradually emerging from the ground, swallowing up billions of public money in the name of French grandeur.

"Today, we would be incapable of carrying out all these projects simultaneously, especially for heritage projects," says the filmmaker, who managed, without spectacular special effects, to recreate on screen these mega-projects that disfigured part of the French capital.

What's the result? Located in the heart of the La Défense business district, one of the largest in Europe, the Grande Arche serves no public function, and part of the building is entirely unoccupied.

"There was panache behind this project, but also a certain wastefulness," says Stéphane Demoustier, who has a very distant relationship with the monument. "It's strange, the Arch, we all know it, but at the same time, no one has a sensitive connection with it."

Except for its late builder.