E.1027 Eileen Gray and the House by the Sea

If, as they say, writing about music is like dancing about architecture, we might consider this an elegant pas de deux on designer Eileen Gray, architect and critic Jean Badovici, and the famous house they built together on the Cote d’Azur, E.1027 (the name is more romantic than it sounds). There is a third wheel here: the modernist superstar Le Corbusier, a friend of Badovici’s who took a shine to the house, and as a gift — or an act of desecration — splashed bright abstract murals across its “ugly” white walls.

Rather than fashion a conventional talking heads documentary, filmmakers Beatrice Minger and Christoph Schaub honour the imaginative avant-garde spirit which inspired Gray, using actors to play the trio of architects in stylized scenes shot in the house and on a sound stage. These scenes serve to illustrate and animate debates about design, form and function. What is the essence of a house? Gray believed it should be designed inside out, putting the human first. Le Corbusier’s fixation on the house is also fascinating, and this becomes another story about the suppression of a female artist — although thankfully Gray lived long enough to see that injustice rectified.

Elegant and slippery.

Katie McCabe, Sight & Sound

Aesthetically beautiful and a great summer watch.

Fiona Rae, Film Threat

[Eileen Gray would] approve of a tribute such as this, what with its stark but elliptical manoeuvres, its grace of form and composition, and the way in which it seems at once modern but somehow lived in.

Hilary White, Sunday Independent