Eiffel
Directed by: Martin Bourboulon
Runtime: 108 Minutes
I was so excited that the Alliance French Film festival could finally go ahead this year after the 2020 festival was cancelled due to ‘you know what’. This year, the focus for the festival’s premier film was on healing and getting back to the basics of French cinema. And what says all you need to know about French film more than a classic romantic melodrama? Eiffel, as the name suggests, focusses primarily on the construction of the now famous Eiffel Tower in Paris with a little bit of love and drama sprinkled in.
The biggest shock for me from this entire film wasn’t the facts about the Eiffel Tower’s construction, but the fact that Emma Mackey (Sex Education) can speak fluent French! I absolutely love Emma in Sex Education and her performance in Eiffel could not be more different. Emma portrays Gustave Eiffel’s original love, Adrienne Bourgès, a rich French country girl with a few daddy issues to say the least. Adrienne is a gentle, free spirit, coddled by her rich upbringing, a complete contrast to her other character Maeve. While Adrienne and Gustave aren’t terrible characters themselves, the film suffers from the classic melodramatic tension of ‘will they, won’t they?’. Throughout the film, there are consistent time jumps, first starting with the Eiffel tower completely constructed and jumping backwards in time to show a young and idealistic Gustave just off the fame and recognition for his construction of the Statue of Liberty. The use of time jumps kept this film interesting as the romantic plot itself was allowed to slowly unravel. The only unbelievable or frustrating thing about the time jumps is how ageless Mackey looks, most likely thanks to portraying a teen in Sex Education, which makes some of her flashbacks difficult to place. Romain Duris, who portrays Gustave, has a marvellous look of beaten and downtrodden in his future portrayals of an otherwise handsome man which made Mackey’s character stand out all the more.
Eiffel takes you to that romantic place in Paris. Don’t we all dream of walking the cobbled stoned streets and seeing the view from the Eiffel Tower with our loved one? Eiffel takes you right there to those romantic interludes between the characters but suffers from the classic romance film trope of a couple who just can’t seem to make it work. I personally hate watching films like this as I don’t believe love needs to be this hard, but they make it work for what the story is, a story about a man who builds a giant thing that originally people didn’t like. The sex scenes between Gustave and Adrienne are very French inspired with *ehm* detailed choreography. However, they manage to keep these moments very tender and it helps build the tension for other time jump moments. The husband character of Adrienne was a little cliched as the abusive and possessive other man, but I can see how this was necessary to join the romance and the monument building tension storylines together.
Now, let’s talk about the best part – the fascinating technical details of how to build a tower. As someone with very little understanding of engineering or math, I wasn’t expecting to find this as interesting as I did, but the film spends a good amount of time discussing the mechanics of building a heavy metal tower in a swampy France. Of course, he built a giant tower to satisfy his penis-envy. It would have loved more exploration about the backlash Gustave initially received for the Eiffel Tower to see how he navigates this conflict as a famous and talented architect but unfortunately it is barely an inconvenience before the plot moves on. Finally, as the film is focussed on the historical and the romantic, it decides to conclude with some text about how many visitors see the Eiffel Tower every year. This wasn’t too cringey, but the text then displays how the tower is the shape of an A (Adrienne). While I appreciate the film was linking the two stories together, this felt a little frustrating and lame after enjoying the primary overall plot.
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