By Ed Symkus

The script is credited to five writers and, well, too many cooks spoil the bouillon.

Eiffel is playing at the AMC Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers and AMC 20 in Methuen.

Romain Duris as Gustave Eiffel in a scene from Eiffel.

Six words flash across the screen at the start of Eiffel: “Freely inspired by a true story.” Pay heed to them, because how much you enjoy this film depends on your tolerance for the lumpy narrative blend of fact and fiction to come.

This French import from director Martin Bourboulon — the first of his three movies to receive an American release — boasts an excellent performance from Romain Duris (All the Money in the World, Mood Indigo) as Gustave Eiffel, a brilliant, meticulous engineer who specialized in metal construction. The protagonist walks through a beautifully photographed film, replete with foggy exteriors, fireplace-lit interiors, and busy, sometimes sweeping camerawork.

And there’s a fascinating story to tell: Eiffel designs metal bridges around the world, supervises the internal structure of the Statue of Liberty, wins a competition for the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris with his design for a 324-meter A-shaped tower, and then faces major challenges delivering a completed tower. The obstacles include a lack of funding that culminates with workers striking because of low pay, and safety concerns. And then there are the complaints from citizens, who call the building an eyesore and “a streetlamp of shame.” But the determined Eiffel overcame the odds, and the tower was inaugurated, after two years of construction, on March 31, 1889. All true!

Then there’s the “freely inspired” part, much of which should probably be credited to the fact that the idea for this film has been kicking around for a couple of decades. The script is credited to five writers and, well, too many cooks spoil the bouillon.

In and around the tall tower tale is a tall tale concerning a long-ago romance between then up-and-coming Eiffel and well-to-do, enigmatic Adrienne Bourgès (Emma Mackey, Maeve Wiley on Netflix’s Sex Education). She apparently was a real person. Depending on which website you go to for biographical research, they might have met in real life, when he was a young man and she was a much younger woman. But they parted ways. The script — in full fictional mode — has them bumping into each other years later, when he was a widower (fact) and she was married to his old college pal, the (invented) journalist Antoine de Restac (Pierre Deladonchamps).

Of course, the old flame between them reignites, propelling the film into a series of flashes, back and forth, detailing Adrienne and Gustave’s old happy days and their complicated present. There are secrets, a convoluted back story, jealousy, acts of retribution, hurt feelings, emotional turmoil, an atmosphere of gloom, and far too much melodrama. All of which gets in the way of the far more fascinating tale of how the tower was built. That movie still has to be made.

Ed Symkus is a Boston native and Emerson College graduate. He went to Woodstock, is a fan of Harry Crews, Sax Rohmer, and John Wyndham, and has visited the Outer Hebrides, the Lofoten Islands, Anglesey, Mykonos, the Azores, Catalina, Kangaroo Island, and the Isle of Capri with his wife Lisa.