A young person from the provinces sets out for the big city, seeking fortune and fame and finding temptation, corruption and ruin. It’s a story that never gets old — there’s usually plenty of lust, ambition and greed to keep the narrative engine humming — and variations pop up in the literature of nearly every nation and era. “Lost Illusions,” Honoré de Balzac’s novel of Parisian literary life, stands as a stellar example in its period and now, thanks to Xavier Giannoli’s invigorating screen adaptation, in ours as well.
Balzac, writing in the early 1840s, reached back a few decades to the Bourbon Restoration, a post-Napoleonic moment of high decadence and low scruple, but what he uncovered were some of the perennial principles of modern life. Principles, though, are exactly what his moderns lack. The pistons that keep their world humming along are cynicism and hypocrisy, and brazen amorality winds through every institution they inhabit, from politics to publishing to theater.
Into this hive of striving and backstabbing comes Lucien Chardon (Benjamin Voisin), a 20-year-old poet we first meet in his hometown, Angoulême, in Southwestern France. There, he scribbles passionate verses in a sun-dappled meadow and earns his living working in a printing shop. Not that his life is defined entirely by pastoral innocence and honest toil. His hobby is vigorous adultery with Mme. de Bargeton (Cécile de France), a married aristocrat who invites him to read his poetry at artistic gatherings in her chateau.
Lucien has aristocratic pretensions of his own. He signs his poems — and, later, his scabrous articles in the Parisian press — Lucien de Rubempré, using his highborn mother’s maiden name. (Lucien’s father, M. Chardon, was a pharmacist.) When Madame’s husband discovers the affair, she takes off for Paris with Lucien and another would-be lover, the Baron du Châtelet (André Marcon), who will eventually be caricatured in the newspapers as an impotent turkey.
Lucien has pouty good looks and ostensible literary talent. The baron and Mme. de Bargeton have connections to the Marquise d’Espard (Jeanne Balibar), a powerful figure in royalist circles. What seemed like a lark in Angoulême goes sour in a hurry. Cast out of his protectors’ company — his bumbling naïveté, so sexy in the countryside, is embarrassing in the big city — Lucien finds his way onto the staff of an anti-royalist scandal sheet, where he makes a splash writing criticism, using de Rubempré as his byline.
As we follow this rake’s progress onscreen — through editorial offices full of hashish smoke, and on to bistros, bawdy houses and music halls — a narrator lays out how it all works. Balzac, one of the fathers of literary realism, was a pioneer of what a later century would call the systems novel, and his explanatory zeal, far from didactic, is almost always delightful.
And so it is in Giannoli’s version. “Lost Illusions” is in some ways a very old-fashioned, supremely French movie, full of costumes and quill pens, sex and speechifying, and stylish acting even in the smallest roles. (The Quebecois actor and filmmaker Xavier Dolan, as Lucien’s well-connected rival, is particularly charismatic.) The novel was turned into a mini-series for French television in 1966, but the breathless sprawl of a longish feature film may serve it better. Balzac was a prodigious coffee drinker, and the movie, though its characters run on champagne and schadenfreude, is nothing if not caffeinated.
It is also earnest in its portrayal of cynicism, without being overly moralistic. Lucien’s career is launched when he delivers an impromptu takedown of a book he hasn’t read for an audience of scribblers presided over by a powerful publisher (Gérard Depardieu). Reviews, positive and negative, are bought and paid for through a complex circuit of bribery and extortion. Audiences flock to theaters on a street called “the boulevard of crime” for its sensational offerings. Ovations and boos are purchased from an unctuous fixer named Singali (Jean-François Stévenin).
Lucien, egged on by his dirtbag editor (Vincent Lacoste), starts making good money. What he doesn’t lose at the gambling tables he spends on an actress named Coralie (the heart-tuggingly sincere Salomé Dewaels), who becomes his muse, his mistress and the film’s emotional center of gravity. Lucien’s love for her is the only pure thing about him — that and the faith in literature that occasionally flickers amid the hackery.
The narrator signals early on that the plot is heading toward tragedy, and further summary would no more spoil “Lost Illusions” than a citation of the law of gravity would spoil a roller-coaster ride. The busy, headlong story, in any case, is a whirring machine for the delivery of piquant ideas about human behavior, and about the workings of a society obsessed with reputation, status and appearance as well as money.
It’s a familiar enough spectacle, and if there’s any justice this movie will become a touchstone and cult object among the grasping, scheming denizens of the current media jungle. Giannoli illuminates the dank frenzy of the 19th-century attention economy with an eye on our own post-truth era. “Lost Illusions” is sensational. Nobody paid me to say that. Well, actually, The New York Times did, but you should believe me anyway.
Lost Illusions
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 29 minutes. In theaters.
