If you’re going to make it up, please make it up better: Eiffel reviewed

Eiffel is a romantic drama purporting to show how a passionate but forbidden love inspired Gustave Eiffel to design and build the Eiffel Tower. The producers say that, by merging fact and fiction – the romance is a fiction, more or less – they hope to create ‘the French Titanic’, which is aiming rather high, if not way, way too high. The love affair is tiresomely humdrum – if you’re going to make it up, please make it up better – plus the stakes are too low, particularly as the Eiffel Tower never hits an iceberg, does not sink, and nobody dies. Although you might, a bit, from boredom.

This is handsomely produced and undemanding in the manner of, say, one of those Sunday-night TV period dramas like Mr Selfridge. It stars Romain Duris as Eiffel, the brilliant engineer who, at the start of the film, has just returned from New York. Did you know he designed the inner structure of the Statue of Liberty? The facts here are genuinely fascinating – did you know that, once the tower was built, the writer Guy de Maupassant loathed it so much he ate lunch at its restaurant every day as it was the only place in Paris where he didn’t have to look at it? – but, alas, this is Gustave Eiffel as lover first, genius engineer second, which is a mighty pity. He has returned to Paris where he has been invited to submit a design for the 1889 opening of the Exposition Universelle. A métro station, that’s his plan, as it will be useful and will endure. His mindset isn’t changed when two engineers from his company show him their idea for a 200-foot wrought-iron lattice tower. ‘Ugly, ugly, ugly,’ he declares.

But then he is reacquainted with Adrienne Bourgès (Emma Mackey), his great love who he was forbidden to marry in his youth as her parents disapproved. The flashbacks show them falling for each other in Bordeaux against glorious sunsets but in the intervening two decades they’ve both married although his wife has died, so he’s now widowed with five children… Hang on, given Mackey’s age (26), wouldn’t she have been six back in Bordeaux? There’s a casting difficulty here, but let’s press on. Meeting her again, we are led to believe, sets him aflame and puts him in the mood for a grand and impressive romantic gesture. Goddamn it, he says, in effect, I will build that tower and I will make it 300 feet, the highest structure in the world!

The film is directed by Martin Bourboulon, and the performances are generally solid but the characterisations are basic. This Gustave Eiffel is not just a sexy dreamboat; he’s also a terrific guy. He is kind to his workers, cares about the common man and fights for what he believes in even if I was always wondering about all those children back home he never seems to see (aside from his oldest daughter, Claire, who actually becomes his assistant). Was there ever an Adrienne Bourgès? The filmmakers say yes, but I took a deep dive and if there was she never played any important part in Eiffel’s life. So what are we watching? Or what are we attempting to watch without dozing off?

The engineering aspects are genuinely fascinating. The bolts replaced by rivets, the sandboxes, the hydraulic issues. But they’re shoved aside to focus on the central relationship which can’t happen for reasons, I have to say, that never even seem that insurmountable, which makes it hard to buy. Meanwhile, the suggestion at the end – that the A-shape of the tower was inspired by Adrienne’s name – doesn’t make sense when you consider that the initial idea wasn’t Eiffel’s. That’s what you’ll be thinking as you leave, as well as: even if it had been his idea, what if she’d been called Zoe? He’d have had his work cut out then.