E.1027 - Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea review – extraordinary architect’s story told (again)

The third film in a decade about Gray tells – with an exasperating lack of passion – a story of explosive emotion, creativity and betrayal

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.