In a triangular tale about the remarkable bisexual Irish artist, architect and designer, Eileen Grey (Orla Brady), the Director Mary McGuckian confirms that it’s “More than a movie; more of a movement.”
As this artsy, sub-titled gem begins, we’re caught up in the frenzy of an auction at Christies in Paris. The gavel comes down on ‘the price of desire’ for that one buyer who wants to pay a high price for art – the famous YSL Le Berger sale of Eileen Grey’s ‘Dragon Chair’ for €28m. The funds are to be used during the production’s restoration work on Grey’s villa e1027 in the South of France.
Now recognized as one of the most influential pieces of 20th century modern architecture, Eileen Gray’s Cote d’Azur villa, plays a key role in the film. But the movie itself is initially flawed. As beautiful to look at as Tom Ford’s Vogue-shot masterpiece, A Single Man, except Ford’s film unfolded in order…allowing us to sink into the very ‘being’ that was Colin Firth’s character. In Coco Before Chanel, another French classic, Coco is a woman in a love triangle of art and men. We’re with her from the beginning, in Coco’s meager orphanage life when she is simply “Gabrielle.” Perhaps intentional, and to be avant garde in its direction, The Price of Desire doesn’t draw us in. Not at first. Instead it separates us as buyer to artist. Keeping us, the viewer, on the outside…much as Gray was kept on the outside as well.
There is so much to learn about Gray from the simplest discoveries as how bicycle handlebars inspired her first ‘tube’ chair.
Orla Brady is brilliant in her portrayal of Gray. Elegant and awe-inspiring at every camera angle; an exotic and pure modernist. The dialog is as poetic as Gray’s approach to architecture and design. “Function and form are refined, and refined is art.” Gray almost mirrors her masterpiece villa…human to house, house to human. This is a film where life and art coexist. Gray is clearly the ‘Mother of Modernism’ to the ‘Father of Modernism,’ Le Corbusier (Vincent Perez) who controversially defaced the villa’s walls and with that, effaced Gray’s moral right to be recognized as its architect. Le Corbusier went as far as to erase her actual ownership of the physical house she so lovingly created.
Alanis Morissette returns to her first love of acting to portray Gray’s on/off lover. Julian Lennon provides some stunning stills for this production widely credited with kick starting the movement which led to the reinstatement of Gray’s legacy. She’s considered one of the 20th century’s most iconic innovators of contemporary design.
In recounting Gray’s person impact of gender discrimination on women in the workplace, we feel a timely female and universal experience still sadly existent in today’s world. But, if the goal of a house is to make life easy, then the goal of this film feels to keep us living vicariously in its yard, so that we, too, imagine what it must have felt like to be Eileen Gray.
Three tiaras