You don’t need to hold a doctorate in Freudian psychology, or to have labored through all 750 pages of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, to know that big towers built by ambitious men usually are, in one way or another, substitutes for their penises.
And yet, in the highly romanticized biopic Eiffel, director Martin Bouboulon spends nearly two hours and a whopping €24 million Euros to arrive at that obvious conclusion, rewriting the tale of the Eiffel Tower’s origins as a passionate love story between the builder and his longtime paramour, Adrienne Bourgès. There are many theories behind what inspired the 300-meter-high landmark, but this overcooked period drama concentrates on only one: he did it all for le nookie.
Released wide in France by producer Pathé, Eiffel performed decently on its opening weekend despite generally middling reviews. It will probably fare worse overseas, where arthouse viewers may have less tolerance for the movie’s boilerplate dialogue and dialed-in romance, although the presence of Sex Education star Emma Mackey may attract a few gawkers.
Credited to five writers, including Bourboulon, the script is a treasure trove of clichés about one great man’s ambition and unrequited desire, focusing on the two-plus years that Gustave Eiffel (Romain Duris) spent building his groundbreaking steel tower in the heart of Paris. Little did we know — and this is the movie’s major twist, which it tries to justify with a full page of explanations in the press notes — that at the same time, Gustave was madly in love with Adrienne (Mackey), a woman he nearly married two decades earlier when he was overseeing construction of a bridge in Bordeaux, and who’s now wed to the influential aristocrat Antoine de Restac (Pierre Deladonchamps).
It’s easy to see where all of this going from the poster, which features the would-be couple on the brink of embracing as they stand amid the tour’s massive steel girders. And while it’s no secret that Eiffel managed to build his tower against all odds, triumphantly unveiling it at the 1889 World’s Fair — an event that would also see France triumph as a nation after decades of lost wars and internal strife — what the film adds to this true story is that Eiffel was, apparently, a brokenhearted hero, leaving behind a monumental phallus as a testament to his lost love. (A detail at the very end offers a clue behind the tower’s unique shape, but it’s not worth spoiling.)
Bourbolon’s decision to favor an imaginary melodrama over the actual feats of Eiffel, a master engineer and architect, ultimately winds up belittling the man’s work, including his eponymous creation. There is no better scene in the film than the one where we see how, using a complex system of hydraulics, he ingeniously connected the tower’s four distinct pillars into a single base, modulating thousands of tons of steel to the millimeter. But such moments are few and far between in a movie that concentrates much more on Eiffel’s private life, turning it into a Belle Époque telenovela of ripped bodices, scorned husbands, parting glances and enough tears to overflow the Seine.
Marking a big leap for the director budget-wise after a pair of racy comedies (Daddy or Mommy and Divorce French Style) that were hits at home, Bourbolon delivers a slick if lifeless depiction of late-19th century Paris, relying too much on CGI to recreate the ash, soot and sweat of the Industrial Age. The result is a film that feels 100% airbrushed — even the workers dangerously hanging off the tower’s beams are too neatly assembled, as if they were video game characters striving to be human.
The same can be said for the cast, led by a trio of strong actors who are given risible lines and phony emotions that were clearly handled with less care than all the costumes and hairstyles, including a collection of finely tailored beards that are worthy of some kind of award. Even the great tower itself, arguably the true star of the movie, doesn’t seem entirely real and may have been painted on in post.
Director: Martin Bourboulon
Screenplay: Caroline Bongrand, Thomas Bidegain, Martin Bourboulon, Natalie Carter, Martin Brossollet
Cast: Gustave Eiffel, Adrienne Bourgès, Antoine de Restac, Alexandre Steiger, Armande Boulanger
Producers: Vanessa Van Zuylen, Jérôme Seydoux
Cinematography: Matias Boucard
Production design: Stéphane Taillasson
Costume design: Thierry Delettre
Editing: Valérie Deseine
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Production companies: VYZ Production, Pathé Films (France)
World sales: Pathé Films
In French
108 minutes
