A TALL TALE
Film about Eiffel Tower's construction is more silly fiction than serious art
Eiffel, a love story awkwardly bolted to a feat of metallurgic engineering, originally went by the title Eiffel in Love. Until (I presume) someone realized that either way you read that aloud — French pronunciation or English — it turns into the most outrageous pun imaginable. And this movie is already outrageous enough.
Billed as “freely inspired by a true story,” Eiffel imagines that the man who designed one of the modern wonders of the world did so out of adoration for a woman. Freudian giggles aside, it even suggests he built her monogram into its superstructure, for which I suppose we can be grateful that her name was Adrienne and not, say, Vivienne.
The film takes place in two time periods. In the mid 1880s, successful civil engineer Gustave Eiffel (Romain Duris) competes to build something for the 1889 Universal Exposition. His original proposal is for a subway system — that would happen a decade later — but when the wife of one of his benefactors smiles on the idea of a tower, he's all in. His employees have already
roughed out a 200-metre-tall pylon. He impulsively declares it'll be 300. With a restaurant.
The woman who inspires him is Adrienne Bourgès (Emma Mackey), wife of Antoine de Restac (Pierre Deladonchamps). Director Martin Bourboulon reveals that she and Eiffel met some 20-odd years earlier, when he was building a bridge near her family home.
The young couple fell in love but were forbidden to marry. Eiffel then wed Marie Gaudelet, who bore five children but died in 1877. Historians declare Bourgès and Eiffel never met again, but screenwriter Caroline Bongrand begs to differ.
It's hard to tell which half of the film is sillier. In the early 1860s, Adrienne is a headstrong young woman who scandalizes her family by wearing pants, and makes a pass at Gustave by throwing herself in the river,
which necessitates him rescuing her, getting her out of those wet clothes, warming her up with his body, and you can guess the rest.
During construction of the tower, meanwhile, there are a lot of stock scenes you've seen in better movies. There's a drafting montage. There's the bit where a frustrated Gustave smashes his tiny model of the tower. There's his rousing speech to his workers, convincing them not to strike. There's the they-said-iwas-crazy sequence, where the locals are protesting this eyesore, while artists decry its ugliness and the Pope worries it'll over shadow nearby Notre Dame.
There's even a bit in which Antoine, suspicious that Gustave has designs on his wife, tells the other man to get out of his prototype automobile and then drives off, perhaps the earliest eat-mydust ever accomplished with a motor vehicle.
Ironically, the film comes most alive in the historical re-enactments of design and construction. We witness Gustave giving potential backers a demonstration of the future tower's strength by zapping a scale model with electricity and pummelling it with hurricane-force rains. Another scene finds him visiting the hellish underground caisson, where air pressure was used to keep groundwater at bay until the foundation could be completed.
Ultimately, Bourboulon's film serves neither the engineering marvel that is the Eiffel Tower, nor the people involved in its creation. The director is now at work on a pair of films about the Three Musketeers. Can't wait to see what revisionist fun he has with that already highly fictionalized tale.