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.