A HOUSE DIVIDED
E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea is what I would call—in a good way—an eccentric film. It’s a curiously interpretive pastiche of multiple elements: docu-fiction, bio-pic, archival footage, imagined scenes with actor recreations, narrative voiceovers, stylized scenes dramatically lit on a stage, readings from diaries and letters, along with historical and contemporary footage of the house in question, even a little bit of choreography, and an appearance by the actual subject of the film, Eileen Gray.
Add to the mix the story of a long-lasting artistic conflict between a man and a woman over a power play of such inordinate disrespect that it might have destroyed this modern masterpiece and nearly erased its creator from architectural history.
It’s based on a true story about designer Eileen Gray (Natalie Radmalle-Quirke) and Le Corbusier (Charles Morillon), a leading pioneer of modern architecture. In an era dominated by men, this Irish-born interior designer, renowned in the Avant Garde and Art Deco movements, created timeless furniture, lamps, abstract geometric rugs and more in the early modernist days of the 1920s. She had a successful business with an elite clientele in Paris.
After a few romances with women, she took a lover, Jean Badovici (Axel Moustache), a French-Romanian architect 15 years younger, who taught her about architecture and helped her build the dream house she designed, E.1027 in Côte D’azur, France. (E.1027 is coded to their initials: E for Eileen, 10 for Jean, 2 for Badovici and 7 for Gray.)
Based on Le Corbusier’s modernist principles, the house was highly personalized by Gray and recognized as an icon immediately after its completion. Le Corbusier declared that a house is a machine for living in, but Gray believed a house needed warmth and a soul, and she imbued hers with these spirits so it could serve as the refuge she had always sought for herself.
The film gives us a partial biography of Gray, who declared herself a fully independent woman, outside the proscribed lines of society’s norms. She came from a wealthy family and had the means to follow her desires and carve her own path.
She signed the house over to Badovici for legal reasons (she wasn’t a French citizen), and he was friends with Le Corbusier, who was obsessed with and envious of Gray’s creation. After Gray broke up with Badovici, despite her expressed wish that the house remain free of decoration, he allowed Le Corbusier to paint garishly colored murals on the white interior walls, completely out of character for the house and destroying its artistic vision and its serenity.
Gray tried fighting back, demanding restitution but Badovici retained ownership and refused to remove the paintings. In the meantime, Le Corbusier built another small villa just meters from hers, and by now, the world began to think that Le Corbusier himself had designed the house. He did nothing to disavow that notion. David vs. Goliath, only this time Goliath “won.”
The whole movie moves at a languid, poetic pace even as it cuts back and forth between the styles, and you’re either an art film fan who tolerates this or you’re not. I am, so for me the film was unconventional, experimental and intriguing. As someone who knows very little about architecture and nothing about the infamous event at the center of the story, it also led me to want to learn more about the house and its creator, a good impact for a movie to have.
This is a film not everyone will see or like. But I did. Even as it navigates its many elements, it has a lyrical flow, painting a portrait both of a woman artist and an architectural masterpiece. It isn’t overly dramatic, it’s not deeply biographical, it is beautifully shot when viewing the house and its setting, it’s quite stylistic, and while not a story told in a single traditional manner, it was challenging enough to pique my interest.
It’s notable that the film was written and directed by a woman, Beatrice Minger (she shares director credits with Christoph Schaub). And thanks to the excellent work of cinematographer Ramon Giger, we see the house in all its angles from outside and in, the beauty of the sea, and the striking nature of the surrounding geography (the film was partially shot at the original location). Composer Peter Scherer keeps the music contextual to the times, enhancing the imagery. But no doubt, the man with the fullest hands is Editor Gion-Reto Killias, who had to piece together all the disparate elements to make it resemble a somewhat linear form, while retaining its artful framework.
Following many insults to the house—from bullet holes by German soldiers, to vandalism and falling into utter disrepair after being taken over by vagrants—E.1027 became the focus of a 2015 movie, The Price of Desire, and the filmmakers helped restore it so they could shoot there. Since then it has been restored to its original state (with replicas of the furniture Gray designed for it) and is now designated a French National Cultural Monument. As of 2021, it was open to the public.
stills courtesy of First Run Features
E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea
First Run Features
Switzerland | 2024 | 89 min. | color
in English and French with English subtitles
limited release now playing at IFC Center in New York
and at Laemmle Theatres in Glendale (May 20) and The Royal, West L.A. (May 23)
hosted Q&As with the director on May 20 at 7:30 in Glendale with Jale Yoldas, Cultural and Public Diplomacy Officer of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco, and at 7:30 on May 22 at the Royal with Frances Anderton, of KCRW’s DnA: Design and Architecture and 7:30
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Thank you, Sarah for reviewing this movie about Eileen Gray.
Eileen Gray was pushed to the margins of design history, with her work often ignored while male contemporaries took inspiration from her ideas without giving her credit.
Her absence from the spotlight was the outcome of a culture that routinely overlooked women’s achievements and treated their creativity as secondary even when they were reshaping modernism.