Eiffel

A man wanting to break the Guinness World Record for the tallest Eiffel Tower sculpture made of matchsticks suddenly saw his dream go up in flames after he was told that the material he used disqualified him for the record.Richard Plaud’s impressive creation amounted to 706,900 matchsticks, 4,200 hours of his life, and a goal to celebrate the most emblematic structure of his country’s capital.A resident of Charente-Maritime, a French department located in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region, the talented artist believed he…

The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was formally launched at the iconic Eiffel Tower on Friday in Paris, France - tourists visiting Paris' Eiffel Tower will now be able to book their trip to the iconic monument using UPI, the NPCI said on Friday. It is part of of the drive to take Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of making UPI a global powerhouse. UPI is the instant payment system developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2016 that is being used in India. It is a digital financial system…

It’s a persistent area of movie myopia – the idea that science or maths or, in this case, engineering is, on its own, not sexy enough to carry a film. Thus portraits of some of the great minds of the 19th century – Mary Anning in Ammonite, and now engineer Gustave Eiffel – are retrofitted with a doomed romance. The way this conventionally handsome period picture tells it, a chance encounter between Eiffel (a tousled Romain Duris) and the long-lost love of his life, Adrienne (Emma Mackey), inspired the tower itself.…

If Michael Caine is the quintessential London actor, Romain Duris could become his Paris equivalent. Born and raised in the city, he rose to international fame in 2005 playing the real-estate hustler with ambitions to be a pianist in Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Quick to the punch but nifty in his fingerwork, dropping rats in a sack on unwanted tenants while wearing Cuban heels, he was Parisian squalor and glamour in one snake-hipped paradox. Then he cashed in his tousle-haired bourgeois-bohème cachet…

Some towering absurdity and vertiginous silliness here … and also a bit of innocent enjoyment. Eiffel is a handsomely produced period drama, a madly Lloyd-Webber-ised romantic fantasy about the construction of the Eiffel tower in 1889 in Paris for the 100th anniversary of the revolution. Screenwriter Caroline Bongrand imagines (which is to say: she entirely invents) a backstory for the great engineer Gustave Eiffel, a grand passion that inspired him to build the tower as his own private Taj Mahal for a lost, secret…