Eiffel review – celebrated tower builder gets cheekily tall backstory | Film
Some towering absurdity and vertiginous silliness right here … and in addition a little bit of harmless enjoyment. Eiffel is a handsomely produced interval drama, a madly Lloyd-Webber-ised romantic fantasy in regards to the development of the Eiffel tower in 1889 in Paris for the one hundredth anniversary of the revolution. Screenwriter Caroline Bongrand imagines (which is to say: she totally invents) a backstory for the nice engineer Gustave Eiffel, a grand ardour that impressed him to construct the tower as his personal personal Taj Mahal for a misplaced, secret love.
Eiffel is performed with authority and gusto – in addition to varied frock coats, prime hats and lengths of beard – by Romain Duris. In actual life he was a widower with 5 kids when he launched into the tower, however this drama declares that as a younger man he had a doomed love affair with the daughter of a snobbish provincial: that is Adrienne, performed by the Franco-British actor Emma Mackey (Maeve, from Netflix’s Intercourse Schooling). Adrienne had damaged Gustave’s coronary heart by vanishing in the future and not using a phrase; her father icily informs Gustave that she had merely misplaced curiosity in him. So in later life, he’s astonished to come across her once more on the very centre of modern belle époque society; she is the spouse of his acquaintance Antoine (Pierre Deladonchamps), an influential journalist and writer who is able to flip political and public opinion in opposition to Eiffel and his ultra-modern tower. There may be clearly nonetheless a spark there: so why, oh why, did she simply vanish that day?
It’s cheeky of Bongrand to invent this swoony romance for Gustave Eiffel; cheekier nonetheless to borrow the plot of Casablanca, with Eiffel within the Humphrey Bogart function, having his coronary heart damaged over again when his Ingrid Bergman turns up out of the blue on one other man’s arm. They’ll all the time have Paris, however then once more they may have Paris proper now. The entire thing is carried out with relish and excessive spirits, and the digital fabrications of the Tower itself, rising out of the bottom in levels with hair-raisingly harmful structural work, are entertainingly contrived.
