The first work of the engineer Gustave Eiffel was the bridge Saint-Jean in Bordeaux. 500 meters of iron structure so that the train that was going to Paris could cross the Garonne river. It was 1857. Eiffel was then 25 years old.
According to the biography The real life of Gustave Eiffel, by Christine Kerdellant in those years in Bordeaux he met the young Adrienne Bourges. The two fell madly in love and wanted to get married, but her father, from a very good family, prevented the marriage.
After that, Eiffel focused on another love, the one he felt for progress. Because of the advances in iron, because of civil engineering works. Countless bridges, stations and even the skeleton of the Statue of Liberty which Auguste Bartholdi designed afterwards, became a reputable name with his own studio outside of Paris.
Romain Duris is Gustave Eiffel.
There he formed a staff of loyal and talented employees whom he asked to come up with a project to present to the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889. Two of them designed an ambitious tower, the tallest in the world. Eiffel rejected her, not because of the challenge of height, by design.
After reviewing it and asking the architect for help Stephen Sauvestre, got the desired result: a stylized iron tower with large lower arcades, high, very high. A prodigy that, moreover, was familiar to the engineer.
He “he examined the design from every angle. Something was strangely familiar. Suddenly, he realized: the tower looked like a gigantic letter A, with smooth curves and beautifully drawn as with a pen. A for Adrienne. Or A for Alice.
It was like bragging their past, lost, fantasized and idealized loves 300 meters away for everyone to see.” This is what Kerdellant writes of the moment in which Gustave Eiffel agreed to build the Eiffel Tower that he did not design, although he did perfect and plan his complicated work.
Emma Mackey is Adrienne.
Fiction or reality? Director Martin Bourboulon decided to accept it as real or at least as epic material for his movie, Eiffel (Theatrical release November 12).
"We know that the love story between Gustave and Adrienne existed in their youth. And the hypothesis is that their love story revived 30 years later and that was what convinced Eiffel to build the Tower and his passion for the project, ”explains the French filmmaker.
In the film, Romain Duris plays Gustave Eiffel and the French-English actress Emma Mckey (Sex Education) is Adrienne. "There are actually three stories: the love story of the past, the present (1880s) and the Tower," continues Bourboulon.
Finding the balance between the three stories, that they feed on themselves, that one does not win over the others was the most difficult thing to achieve in a long shoot (because of covid) and also in a montage that lasted 36 weeks.
The Eiffel Tower built for the film.
According to the hypothesis of the film and the book on which it is based, Eiffel dedicated the Tower to Adrienne (not Alice, who was a cousin he also had a crush on). And in the years around the construction they met and were together until her death.
The engineer outlived his first wife (with whom he had five children) and also Adrienne, because he died bankrupt and forgotten at the age of 91.
And the symbol of that love survived. The Eiffel Tower with its 300 meters was the highest in the world until 1930 when the Chrysler Building opened in New York. They called her “monstrous” and Parisians loved her as much as they feared her.
I was destined to be destroyed 20 years later of its construction, but it is still there, receiving more than seven million visitors a year. Symbol of Paris, progress and love. It was born as a romantic gift and it still is today.