Eiffel (2021)

Eiffel arrives as a handsomely appointed costume drama, which is the most reliable method for smuggling an entirely invented love affair into the historical record. Gustave Eiffel, played by Romain Duris, would prefer to build a subway for Paris than a 300 metre iron tower, until a woman from his past walks into a society party and rearranges his ambitions. What follows is twenty-six years of thwarted passion, a lost child, a jealous newspaperman, and a closing revelation that the tower has been shaped like the letter A all along. The film is unapologetically old-fashioned, as one reviewer observed, and it intends this as a compliment. We are meant to swoon, not to think.

For a story set in the middle of French imperial expansion, with a World's Fair as its backdrop, the film shows almost no interest in who else was standing in the frame. The cast is uniformly white, the colonial machinery of 1889 is invisible, and the lone gesture toward class politics is a workers' strike that dissolves the moment Eiffel opens his personal checkbook. That resolution is telling. The crowd is calmed not by better wages but by the spectacle of individual genius, and the film regards this as triumph. Adrienne, played by Emma Mackey, has a defiant streak and speaks up for Eiffel when it counts, then spends the remainder of the running time sacrificing herself so that a monument may stand. It is a familiar arrangement, presented without a flicker of discomfort.

There is no environmental argument here, no examination of the body, no neurodivergent interiority, no queer undercurrent, and no sermon. The film fabricates its history freely and does so in the service of romance, not ideology. It is a pleasant, well-dressed anachronism, and it asks nothing of us but a handkerchief.