Lost Illusions: a fascinating adaptation of Balzac (review)

The big winner of the 2022 Césars arrives on television, on Canal +. Do not miss.

With Lost illusions, Xavier Giannoli brings Balzac’s novel to the big screen to reveal its perfidious current affairs and lets the unstoppable force of his staging speak. An impressive film, released in cinemas in October 2021, which has since triumphed at the Césars and which is to be (re)watched this evening in encrypted form.

Balzac, terror of schoolchildren overwhelmed under the weight of his descriptions, is very soluble in the cinema. As proof, after Eugenie Grandet by Marc Dugain last month, here is Lost illusions by Xavier Giannoli, a thorough debunking of the small world of Parisian journalism under the Restoration. The big question with each adaptation is of course to highlight the glaring topicality of the text. Giannoli pulls no punches and uses an omnipresent voice-over to assert the adage of “all rotten” across the centuries. It is necessarily edifying and very clever anyone who could provide proof to the contrary. let’s remember that Daisy, her previous opus, already saw an overly generous naive obtaining the favors of freeloaders. Giannoli is torn by this notion of appearance which can see a ballroom singer, an ordinary good guy or even a tragic crook, getting caught in the artificial light of reality.

Could the filmmaker himself be one of these, with fiction allowing him, through a game of mirrors, to put things back a little? If Lost Illusions is a fascinating film, it owes it less to Balzac’s reinvented prose than to the strength of his inspiration as a filmmaker. The impressively masterful staging constructs and deconstructs in the same gesture a solid edifice in which the world, which has become a theater, is populated by fragile puppets. Finally, we will highlight the fine performance of Benjamin Voisin, formidable in the skin of Lucien de Rubempré, a (lost) young man on whom all our illusions crystallize.

Focus on the VFX of Aline, Lost Illusions and Annette, nominated for the César for best visual effects