The Price of Desire

The Milano Design Film Festival 2015 opened with Mary McGuckian’s film on Eileen Gray, a specific choice by the curators.

The film is constructed as an exchange between Le Corbusier – who speaks to the cameras giving his version of the story – and Eileen Gray, the protagonist of the film to whom the director gives the first and last word. The result is a portrait of a professional woman with vast dedication to her work, great artistic integrity and boundless energy. Two interwoven stories and two versions of the same events that do not tally.

Gray knew Le Corbusier well and was in contact with him from the 1920s to his death in 1965, in the waters before E.1027 near the Cabanon, the architect’s buen retiro in the Cap Martin woods. The film re-establishes the identity of the villa’s true designer and explores the dramatic story that took place around it.

Eileen Gray worked on the project and supervised the works for more than three years, studying the details, routes, the orientation of every room, the ideal views and the passages from one room to another. She also designed its furnishings and interiors. Jean Badovici was her partner and the editor of the magazine L’Architecture Vivante. After they separated, he invited Le Corbusier to stay in the villa and the architect decided to paint eight murals on the intact walls of the house mocking Eileen’s bisexuality and the nature of her relationship with her lover.

This irreverent act was accompanied by failure to acknowledge Grey as the work’s sole, innovative and original architect and interior designer. The Price of Desire features admirable research into the historic records, reiterates a historic truth and celebrates a woman who was, indeed, a leading light of the 20th century.

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