This new romantic epic telling the story of the Eiffel Tower’s architect and the woman who inspired him is well told, but falls short of being profound.
★★★✰✰
From the opening shot of a bearded, brooding architect gazing over the Paris skyline, to the balcony of the structure which has just redefined that skyline for eternity, it is clear that the Eiffel of the title refers to Gustave Eiffel the man, not his famous tower. Martin Bourboulon’s new French-language drama resists the conventions of the historical biopic, and lets the facts of the Eiffel Tower’s construction in the late 1880s play second fiddle to a semi-fictitious love affair between its creator (played by Romain Duris, who seems to have been created in a lab to play a troubled genius) and a spirited and intellectual married woman, Adrienne (Emma Mackey).
In keeping with this approach, Matias Boucard’s cinematography and Alexandre Desplat’s soundtrack effectively draw our focus away from all the noise and to Gustave himself. Scenes are often jarringly interrupted by close-ups of Gustave’s face — reminders that this is his story, and every detail on screen orbits around him. Those details range from the historical, such as construction workers’ discontent or French flags waving at the Tower’s inauguration, to the intimately familiar clattering of a fork used incorrectly at a formal dinner or a folk song chanted in the pub.Ironically, when the film does conform to biopic conventions, such as when Gustave gives a monologue on how the Tower “defies gravity” and similar platitudes, it falls slightly flat, but these less satisfying moments only serve to highlight the greater originality of the rest of the film.
Gustave’s character is prioritized to the extent that his famous tower, whose name will likely be the main draw for audiences, is rarely shown on screen in full. Instead it exists as hurried etchings on paper, a rivet carried by a crane over the skyline, or a structure ominously half-built. This is not a film about the tower, but rather about its formidable presence in the lives of Gustave and those around him.
One of those people is Adrienne, Gustave’s former lover from twenty years earlier whom he had to abandon following the disapproval of her family. When Gustave fortuitously sees her one day, Desplat masterfully allows a frantic orchestra sountracking a brisk walk through Paris to give way to an isolated piano. Their first meeting is the most impactful of the film’s many visual and musical shifts, which is fitting because in this film that plays fast and loose with historical fact, Gustave’s change of heart about designing the Eiffel Tower (at the peak of his career, following his lauded design for the Statue of Liberty) was inspired by this chance meeting with Adrienne.
Without any historical evidence for this having been the case, the film has ample legwork to do in convincing the audience of Adrienne’s status as a muse for Gustave’s most famous monument, and sometimes falls short. The crucial dinner in which Adrienne proposes her support for the Tower is unhelpfully accompanied by a lingering shot of her cleavage, and Gustave’s change of heart feels a little too sudden given his previous dismissal of monuments that are not straightforwardly functional. The link between a genius’ great idea and the love that inspired it is thus never adequately formed.
In this way, the film is not a particularly profound observation on the nature of genius, or on what it means to be a muse, in the manner of, for example, Amadeus or Sunday in the Park with George. Nevertheless, the love story between Gustave and Adrienne itself is well told. The flashbacks depicting their early romance are unabashedly in the style of a period drama — Mackey’s portrayal balancing bourgeois playfulness with moments of steely resolve — without ever falling into cliche (no nostalgic veneers of yellow-orange light to be found here). Later on, Adrienne’s recollection of a traumatic incident in her past is painful without feeling exploitative, and aside from the earlier cleavage-centric scene, the male gaze is far from pervasive; Caroline Bongrand’s script centres Adrienne’s agency both in the sex scenes and in the poignant concluding scene of the romantic subplot.
Eiffel has elements both of a great portrait of an individual man, and of a great romantic epic. However, as implied in some very far-fetched suggestions made by the intertitles at the end of the film, much that the film has to say about Gustave and his great love rests on a certain theory about Adrienne’s connection with the tower, which the film never makes sufficiently convincing. Therefore, while the film has ideas about genius and about love, the vessel it chooses to express these ideas is based in flimsy historical fiction and never quite does them justice.
The Verdict
Eiffel is a satisfying watch for any lover of the period drama or romantic epic, but it fails to allot enough time to convince the audience of its ‘big idea’, or provide much substance beyond its pleasing cinematography.
Words by Clementine Scott.
Eiffel is in cinemas 8th August.
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