Lost Illusions

Sumptuous, astute, simply enchanting: this film adaptation of Honoré de Balzac by Xavier Giannoli (“Chanson d'Amour”) immediately wins you over. Just like its main character, the young poet Lucien (Benjamin Voisin), who ventures from the provinces to the big city of Paris in the 1820s with the grand dream of writing an important novel. By chance, Lucien, a country bumpkin, gets a job at a tabloid newspaper and quickly rises through Parisian society as a sensitive idealist thanks to his linguistically sophisticated newspaper articles. An important publisher even wants to publish his novel. But Lucien overplays his hand and has to learn about the true mechanisms of power: profit, envy, and fake news. Can Lucien remain true to his dreams, or will the city of love swallow him up? Between 1837 and 1844, Honoré de Balzac published his three-part socially critical novel “Illusions perdues” as part of his monumental cycle “The Human Comedy.” With his usual acumen, Balzac exemplarily describes the mechanisms he observed in Restoration France in the literary world, journalism, and high society. For his clever and pompous film adaptation, director Giannoli was not only invited to compete at the Venice Film Festival, but also received seven Césars—the most important French film award—including for “Best Film.” The cast also includes French film stars Cécile de France, Vincent Lacoste, Xavier Dolan, Jeanne Balibar, and Gérard Depardieu. “This congenial adaptation of Honoré de Balzac's novel of the same name transfers its impact to the screen, while at the same time emphasizing its universal elements. The intelligent screenplay, formal mastery, and accomplished actors lend the film an extraordinary liveliness, density, and expressiveness. - Worth seeing.” (Lexikon des Internationalen Films) "Balzac had no illusions about journalism and the media. His book and its film adaptation are highly topical in times of fake news, in times of justified and unjustified criticism of the media and its morals, in times when the public is also very willing to agree with the view that the media is not there to serve democracy and educate people for the better, but only to entertain them in the cheapest and easiest way possible. [...] More important than looking at the backdrop is the gaze with which this backdrop is viewed. This gaze is constantly in motion. It is dynamic, alert, interested not only in observation, but also in establishing or severing relationships. It is the gaze of a society, it is a share in its gaze." (Rüdiger Suchsland, on: artechock.de)