When girl meets theme-park ride...
The unlikely woman-and-machine pairing of JUMBO could be 2021’s greatest love story
IN 2007, a woman married the Eiffel Tower. When Erika Eiffel (née Labrie) got ‘hitched’ to the Parisian landmark, she soon became the most famous advocate of object sexuality — that is, romantic attraction to inanimate objects. Her story soon caught the attention of Belgian filmmaker Zoé Wittock. “I just read this very cheesy article, from one of those bad newspapers,” Wittock recalls. “I thought it was a joke.” Sensing cinematic potential, Wittock tracked Erika Eiffel down for a phone conversation. “I was really surprised to see that she was not the freak that I had expected. The way that she talked was really normal and reasonable. I came out of the call thinking, ‘Well, you know, why not? It is just a love story.’”
Jumbo, the fictional film inspired by Erika Eiffel that Wittock has written and directed, is just a love story too, a simple romance between lonely outsider Jeanne (played by Portrait Of A Lady On Fire’s breakout star
Noémie Merlant) and a fairground ride in a Belgian amusement park. It sounds odd. And, well, it is. (There is a sex scene, if you’re wondering.) But Wittock followed a standard movie romance playbook. “I wanted to show people that this was a conventional story,” she says. “I wanted to ground it in the reality of a simple love story, like girl-meets-boy. It gave the movie a more classical structure, I guess. It’s only the subject of the love that was so peculiar.”
As with any leading man, there was an intense casting process for that subject, the carousel that quite literally sweeps Jeanne off her feet. “We’re already playing with such a delicate premise — I really needed to find the right in-between,” recalls Wittock. “We searched for a very long time.” Eventually a ride in France was found that had enough personality to it, with a shape “like a carrying hand — like the hand of King Kong,” she says. In the film, the ride is almost alien-like, moving of its own accord; the production had to reprogramme the ride from automatic to manual, and replaced 3,700 bulbs to have full control of Jumbo’s lighting colours. Six people operated the ride’s movements, acting and reacting to Merlant’s performance. “All the technicians were actually actors,” Wittock says.
But what did Erika Eiffel make of the film she inspired? “She came to the European premiere in Berlin. I was so stressed,” Wittock says. “I kept looking at her during the screening. The great thing is that she was laughing and crying along with everyone. She loved it. She told me there were things in the film that actually happened, and how did I know? I was like, ‘Well, your story is universal, y’know?’” It’s like When Harry Met Sally — if Harry was a giant mechanical tilt-a-whirl.