Joyce Glasser reviews E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea (May 16, 2025) Cert 15. 90 mins.
Architecture is immensely visual but great films about architecture and architects are rare. Despite many compelling true stories about architects, the fictional The Brutalist had more of us looking at concrete than did Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary Architecton also from 2024. Although Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub’s film E.1027: Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea is a flawed docudrama, it would be a shame if it is overlooked in the same way in which Gray herself has been.
A shame because hers is one of the most fascinating, tragic and illuminating stories in the annals of architecture. In the past ten years, since the beginning of the restoration of the modernist house that Gray built on the French Riviera with her lover, the Romanian-French critic and publisher/journalist Jean Badovici, two filmmakers have had a go. First there was Marco Antonio Orsini’s 2014 documentary Gray Matters, and a year later, Mary McGuckian’s The Price of Desire.
Minger and Schaub use a mix of archival footage, excerpts from Gray’s journals voiced over by Natalie Radmall-Quirke as Gray, and re-created scenes set in the actual house between Gray, Badovici, (Axel Moustache) and Le Corbusier (Charles Morillon).
With Gray as a first person narrator, the directors want to take us into the mind of the elusive, independently wealthy Irish workaholic. We pick up on her frustration and resilience as she struggles to make her mark in a man’s world on her own terms. Ultimately, however, Gray retreats from this world to invent and create in Paris. ‘Men wanted to compete and get married,’ she says. ‘Those games weren’t for me.’
Gray nonetheless left her mark with two houses, both in Roquebrune du Cap between Nice and Menton: E.1027 and The Tempe a Païa House, in which she lived after abandoning E.1027 and Badovici. She also left her mark on furniture designs, notably the “Dragons” armchair, the Bibendum Chair and the E.1027 table.
The film begins with one of many quotations from Gray’s journals that are more effective than are the weak dramatisations in exposing her reactions to the world’s encroachment into her refuge. ‘With this house, I found something I didn’t know I missed. A house I’ve been longing for all my life,’ she says. But Gray, who was born in County Wexford in 1878 and died in Paris in 1976, only lived in this refuge for two years.
An introvert, Gray was more interested in swims in the sea off the rocks in front of E.1027 and working on her designs than she was in playing hostess to celebrity visitors who flocked to the house in the early 1930s. Although she paid for the land, she purchased it in Badovici’s name and was all but forced out by Badovici’s obsession with Le Corbusier; and by Le Corbusier’s obsession with Gray’s masterpiece.
We see the unlikely lovers meet in Gray’s studio where Badovici, the outgoing, gregarious and influential editor of the French magazine L’Architecture Vivante, and a promotor of the international (modernist) style of architecture, encourages Gray to build a house to complement her furniture. In the end, while neither of them are known as architects, they decide to build it together and in the process, Eileen, a bi-sexual, 15 years his senior, becomes Badovici’s lover.
Enter Le Corbusier, who recognises his principles of design but also, the superior execution of them by this brilliant, older Irish woman and her lover. Apparently with Badovici’s permission, Le Corbusier begins painting brightly coloured and sexually graphic murals on Gray’s pristine white walls. This act of architectural vandalism is at the heart of the film, but the casting and direction of the three main characters is flat and muted as though we are witnessing heated passions through a screen.
If Gray does not come across as a romantic, the name of the house suggests a romantic streak. For reasons suggested in the film, Gray bequeathed the house to him when she left. The name, E.1027 symbolises the optimism of their unofficial marriage. The “E” stands for Eileen, the 10 is the 10th letter of the English alphabet or J, for Jean, the ‘2’ stands for the second, B which is Badovici and the seven is the seventh letter of the alphabet, G, for Gray.
Unfortunately, the film skips over the architectural collaboration and the actual building of the house between 1926 and 1929 and takes us to the short, happy period before the onslaught of the intelligentsia and film stars who descended on the Riviera. ‘I had found the home where I was meant to be and for a short time, I was able to share it with someone.’
This last bit is significant since Gray’s previous house sharing was with a singer named Daniella, who just wanted to party while Gray “wanted to work.” History repeats itself with Badovici who, as a mover and shaker in the architectural world post WWI, reveres Le Corbusier and, pandering to his fame, ultimately betrays Gray.
If we are unconvinced that we know Gray by the end of the film, we learn more about the megalomaniacal Le Corbusier who let people believe he designed the house, ignored Gray’s request to remove the murals, and built himself Le Cabanon, right behind E.1027. And while the filmmakers used post-production to get rid of the murals in the early dramatised scenes before Le Corbusier’s arrival, visitors today will see the murals that survived the restoration. This is, perhaps, the most telling aspect of the film.
