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.