Eiffel

There is no piece of architecture more exhausted by the camera than the Eiffel Tower. It is the ultimate cinematic shorthand; if a director needs you to know a scene is in Paris, they slap that iron lattice in the background, and—voila—you’re there. It’s a postcard, a trinket, a cliché. Yet, Martin Bourboulon’s 2021 biopic-adjacent drama, Eiffel, tries to strip away a century of tourist fatigue to remind us that this thing was once considered a monstrous eyesore, an engineering impossibility, and, if the screenplay is to be believed, a giant metal "I miss you" note.

I watched this on a Tuesday night while trying to ignore the rhythmic thumping of my neighbor’s new treadmill, and honestly, the sheer scale of the construction scenes made my living room feel significantly larger. There’s something undeniably satisfying about watching 19th-century rivets being hammered home in 4K resolution.

The Man, The Metal, and The Melodrama

The film finds Gustave Eiffel, played with a fantastic, soot-covered intensity by Romain Duris (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), at a crossroads. He’s just finished his work on the Statue of Liberty’s skeleton and wants to build a subway system. He’s a man of utility, a pragmatist. But the French government wants a "wow" factor for the 1889 World Fair. Gustave isn’t interested until he spots Adrienne Bourgès (Emma Mackey) across a crowded room.

If you’ve seen Emma Mackey in Sex Education or her turn as the titular author in Emily (2022), you know she has this incredible ability to look like she’s thinking three moves ahead of everyone else in the room. Here, she plays Gustave’s lost love from twenty years prior. The film jumps between their youthful, sun-drenched romance in Bordeaux and the "present" day of 1887, where the Tower begins to rise.

The central conceit of the film is bold: The Eiffel Tower is basically just a giant, 300-meter 'I miss you' text. The screenplay suggests that the "A" shape of the tower is a tribute to Adrienne. Is it historically accurate? Not in the slightest. Is it a bit much? Absolutely. But in the landscape of contemporary cinema, where we are often drowned in cynical deconstructions, there’s something almost rebellious about a mid-budget French epic that leans this hard into old-fashioned, sweeping romanticism.

Reconstructing the Iron Lady

Where Eiffel truly soars is in its depiction of the work. We live in an era of seamless CGI where entire planets are rendered in a computer, but Martin Bourboulon chooses to focus on the grit. The sequences showing the foundation being dug in the mud of the Seine are claustrophobic and tense. You feel the weight of the iron. You feel the precariousness of the men hanging off beams hundreds of feet in the air without so much as a Carabiner to save them.

The production design by Stéphane Taillasson is lush, contrasting the muddy, industrial chaos of the Champ de Mars with the rigid, velvet-lined salons of the Parisian elite. It’s a film that understands that engineering is just a very expensive way to express an emotion. When Eiffel is fighting the press, the politicians, and even his own workers, the movie feels like a high-stakes thriller. It’s The Social Network but with more rivets and better wine.

However, the film struggled to find its footing at the box office, raking in only about half of its $26 million budget. Released as the world was still wobbling out of pandemic lockdowns, it fell into that "prestige gap"—too lavish for a casual stream, but perhaps too traditional for a younger audience raised on the rapid-fire pacing of the MCU. It’s a "heritage film," a genre the French usually excel at, but one that feels increasingly endangered in the age of franchise dominance.

A Tale of Two Timelines

The chemistry between Romain Duris and Emma Mackey is the engine that keeps the movie from stalling. Duris plays Eiffel not as a visionary saint, but as a stubborn, slightly arrogant genius who is clearly out of his depth when it comes to his feelings. Mackey, meanwhile, has to do a lot of the heavy lifting as the "mysterious woman from the past." She manages to make Adrienne feel like a flesh-and-blood person rather than just a muse, even when the script leans into melodrama.

One of the more interesting "stuff you didn't notice" details involves the casting of Pierre Deladonchamps (Stranger by the Lake) as Antoine Restac, Adrienne’s husband and Eiffel’s initial political ally. He plays the "antagonist" with a subtle, wounded dignity that makes the central love triangle feel less like a soap opera and more like a genuine tragedy of timing.

The film does occasionally stumble under the weight of its own ambition. The transitions between the 1860s and the 1880s can feel abrupt, and the ending takes some liberties with historical reality that might make a biographer’s eye twitch. But as a piece of contemporary French cinema, it’s a fascinating artifact. It’s a film that treats the construction of a landmark as a spiritual battle.

Ultimately, Eiffel is a beautiful, if slightly flawed, attempt to turn a landmark back into a story. It doesn't quite reach the heights of the masterpieces it aspires to emulate, but it’s a far more rewarding watch than the generic blockbusters that usually occupy our screens. If you’re in the mood for a movie that looks like a million bucks (or 26 million, to be precise) and features people in waistcoats looking longingly at each other across rainy construction sites, this is your weekend sorted. It’s a reminder that even the coldest iron starts with a spark.