“Everyone, at Balzac, even the doors, has genius,” wrote Baudelaire in romantic art, to describe the impressive work of the French writer. In his human comedypoetry rubs shoulders with philosophy, realism unfolds in a frenzied ballet of customs, loves, betrayals, whims and bereavements, these seemingly banal experiences that trace destinies and chain individuals in the boxes reserved for them. the society.
It takes more than courage and ambition to dare to translate the whirlwind of details, the larger than life characters, the strong cynicism and the romantic excesses of Honoré de Balzac into images, on the big screen moreover.
With its adaptation of Illusions lost, which required a publication in three parts between 1837 and 1843, Xavier Giannoli succeeded in his bet. The French director makes the necessary narrative choices – concentrating on the second part of the novel – without ever sacrificing the impetus and movement of the author, the grandiloquence of the setting, the characters and their torments, the density and the multiplicity of issues.
Lucien de Rubempré (Benjamin Voisin) is an ambitious and unknown young poet who dreams of Paris, success, art and money. He will leave the family printing house to try his luck in the City of Light on the arm of his lover and protector, the Countess of Bargeton (Cécile de France, who recently told the Homework the great pleasure she had working with the filmmaker).
To avoid scandal, Lucien is quickly left to himself with three pennies in his pocket. Recruited by a cultural newspaper to write reviews, he discovers the backstage of a world dominated by profit and pretense where everything, literature, the press and the theater, politics, feelings and reputations, is governed by the laws of the market, slaves to the will of the highest bidder.
Xavier Giannoli’s camera espouses the frenetic whirlwind of a society draped in artifice and trickery, lavish elegance and tempting mouths. In the narration, Xavier Dolan (who also plays Raoul Nathan, an ardent defender of the art) recounts an environment where feathers are vengeful and pernicious, dramas, as fiery as drunkenness, and looks, loving, determined or bordering on despair. Under his cadence, the world becomes theatre. She levitates with virtuosity above the crowds, weaves her way between puffy dresses and glasses of champagne, accompanies the joy of applause and the distress of boos, raises the sides of a curtain where deals concluded and stolen kisses are concealed. , captures, suddenly interrupted in its tracks, broken hearts and disappointed illusions.
The filmmaker manages to find his breath through this frenzy, never letting his aesthetic prowess overshadow the stakes, emotions and social criticism. Because through Balzac’s disdain for the bourgeoisie and the merchant society, Xavier Giannoli seeks first and foremost to hold up a mirror to his contemporaries. It is here that he tramples the most. His remarks — pointing the finger at a press run by market logic, the corruption that threatens journalists and the virulence of fake news — sometimes lack nuance, but remain shot through with accents of truth, recalling that history, like the human , is doomed to an eternal renewal.