There is some exasperatingly passionless and obtuse direction in this detached, sometimes almost somnolent drama-documentary about the extraordinary Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray, played here with a distracted air by Natalie Radmall-Quirke. (This film comes after another odd docudrama about Gray, Mary McGuckian’s The Price of Desire, from 2015.)
In the late 1920s, Gray designed and built a modernist villa on the Côte d’Azur for herself and her lover, the Romanian architectural journalist Jean Badovici (played here by Axel Moustache): she called it E.1027 (the “E” standing for Eileen, 10 meaning the 10th letter, J, for Jean, the second, B, for Badovici and the seventh, G, for Gray.) But she quarrelled with him and impulsively moved out, leaving him in sole possession of this marvellous property – and then Badovici’s friend Le Corbusier, nettled by this brilliant work which was inspired by but possibly surpassed his own, painted frescoes all over the white walls. He then allowed the architectural world to assume E.1027 was his own work and the feebly submissive Badovici simply allowed him to do it.
So this is a story of explosive emotion, creativity and betrayal, but you wouldn’t think so from this film’s somnambulist tread; it declines fully to inhabit any of its scenes, almost as if it is showing the actors in rehearsal, sauntering self-consciously through the action. Eileen and Jean get into a car, for example, by sitting down on two chairs side-by-side on a soundstage. The drama side of things is seemingly muted by the documentary side.
The film, moreover, doesn’t show the blood, sweat and tears that must have surely been involved in the colossal task of building E.1027 in such a remote spot. The house is just there and the characters waft through it. Gray admirers might prefer Gray Matters, Marco Antonio Orsini’s documentary on the subject.
• E.1027 - Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea is in UK and Irish cinemas from 16 May
