Some towering absurdity and vertiginous silliness here … and also a bit of innocent enjoyment. Eiffel is a handsomely produced period drama, a madly Lloyd-Webber-ised romantic fantasy about the construction of the Eiffel tower in 1889 in Paris for the 100th anniversary of the revolution. Screenwriter Caroline Bongrand imagines (which is to say: she entirely invents) a backstory for the great engineer Gustave Eiffel, a grand passion that inspired him to build the tower as his own private Taj Mahal for a lost, secret love.
Eiffel is played with authority and gusto – as well as various frock coats, top hats and lengths of beard – by Romain Duris. In real life he was a widower with five children when he embarked on the tower, but this drama declares that as a young man he had a doomed love affair with the daughter of a snobbish provincial: this is Adrienne, played by the Franco-British actor Emma Mackey (Maeve, from Netflix’s Sex Education). Adrienne had broken Gustave’s heart by vanishing one day without a word; her father icily informs Gustave that she had simply lost interest in him. So in later life, he is astonished to encounter her again at the very centre of fashionable belle époque society; she is the wife of his acquaintance Antoine (Pierre Deladonchamps), an influential journalist and publisher who is in a position to turn political and public opinion against Eiffel and his ultra-modern tower. There is clearly still a spark there: so why, oh why, did she just vanish that day?
