Direction: Xavier Giannoli
Country: France
Lost Illusions is a resolute, playful, and contemporary adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s three-part classic of the same. The material is not a walk in the park, but director Xavier Giannoli, who wrote the screenplay with Jacques Fieschi, nails it with cleverness rather than brilliance.
The story revolves around the rise and fall of Lucien de Rubempré (Benjamin Voisin), a self-confident young poet from Angoulême turned journalist of the moment in Paris with the influence of his friend Ettiene Lousteau (Vincent Lacoste), a crooked art critic paid to write lies in an influential local newspaper. Inhabiting a phony world populated by fragile puppets, Lucien makes amends with his former lover, the sincere patroness of the arts Louise de Bargeton (Cécile de France); contends with the latter’s noxious cousin, the Marquise D’Espard (Jeanne Balibar); opposes and then befriends the seductive writer Raoul Nathan (Xavier Dolan); meets Dauriat (Gérard Depardieu), a peculiar publisher who doesn’t know how to read nor write; and embraces the actress Coralie (Salomé Dewaels), who is about to make her first big appearance on stage with a play by Racine.
Tonally unalterable, the film’s happenings always seem far from a true climax while trying to play as a modern fresco. It’s a tragedy of hypocrisy and ambition that gets somewhat clumsy when it tries to build bridges with the present. Yet, its literary schemes, vain aristocratic pose, and an assortment of comportments that oppose liberals and royalists sometimes provide us with a good laugh.
Anchoring his period drama with a killer cast, Giannoli expresses his desire to mix lyrical and satirical spark, but he draws the film out and comes nowhere near Balzac’s serial novel. A word of praise for Belgian cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, whose refined taste for visuals is remarkable.
