Lost Illusions Review: Blistering Balzac Adaptation Reminds That Fake News Is Nothing New – Variety

In France, the names Rastignac and Rubempr serve as a kind of shorthand even today two iconic characters who signify opposite sides of the same vice. Both prominent players in Honor de Balzacs expansive La Comdie Humaine, the ambitious parvenus are virtual nobodies of vaguely noble extraction who arrive agog in early-19th-century Paris, and compromise their way to the top. For Rastignac, the strategy works to his advantage; not so much for Lucien de Rubempr, whose swift ascent and humiliating fall are dramatically detailed in Balzacs masterpiece, Lost Illusions, laying the roller-coaster track for this sumptuous and surprisingly au courant cinematic retelling.

Adapting Balzac is no small feat for any filmmaker, and in whittling down the three volumes (and 700-plus pages) that comprise Lost Illusions to a robust two and a half hours, director Xavier Giannoli has a million choices to make. Casting was crucial he shrewdly taps Summer of 85 discovery Benjamin Voisin to play Lucien, surrounding the gifted newcomer with top talents (including Grard Depardieu and Xavier Dolan) but more important was the filmmakers decision to emphasize the characters shady career as a journalist.

Turns out, theres nothing new about fake news, and it may shock todays audiences to learn just how powerful and how corrupt the media was two centuries ago this year. Balzac set the tale in 1821, just as printing presses were making it possible to mass-produce misinformation, and sell-out artistes set aside their dreams of writing great literature and settled for influence instead. Money was the new royalty, and no one wanted to cut off its head, Giannolis narration-hefty screenplay informs, liberally appropriating the masters best insights the master being Balzac, of course.

At the time, the novelist risked negative press by exposing Paris pay-for-play print racket for what it was. Now, Giannoli gives Balzac the last laugh: Lost Illusions exposes his critics as the charlatans they were, detailing how any review can be twisted to serve an agenda and worse, how easily the public can be manipulated. This sweeping period drama may be up to its eyeballs in costumes and carriages, but it plays with all the brio and jeopardy of a modern-day gangster movie, featuring hack journalists as its antiheroes.

Plus a change, plus cest la mme chose, as they say, or The more things change, the more they stay the same. As the film opens in Angoulme, the idealistic Lucien fancies himself a poet, his efforts encouraged by a wealthy patron, the lovely, lonely Louise de Bargeton (a corseted Ccile de France, looking badly in need of some illicit attention). Louise believes in the arts, and sponsors a small collection of Luciens sonnets, dedicated somewhat indiscreetly to her with everyone in the salon able to infer whom he means.

For a young writer, it is an enormous validation to see ones work in print, whether or not the words themselves merit the paper. Lucien certainly doesnt lack for confidence after Louise makes the gesture of underwriting the publication of the poets Marguerites. But their special relationship or its erotic dimension, at least proves short-lived when Louises humiliated husband discovers her pet project, and Lucien is obliged to move to Paris to seek his fortune there.

Brandishing his mothers maiden name, Lucien de Rubempr (n Chardon) arrives an idealist determined to write a novel, and leaves a cynic, the subject of someone elses. The space in between provides this shameless social climber a whirlwind tour of all the fame, fortune and romance a modern city can offer. For starters, Lucien receives his first invitation to the opera, then makes every wrong move imaginable at his closely watched debut: He invests in a silly-looking makeover, knows nothing of opera etiquette, and through his gauche behavior, proceeds to embarrass Louise and her even more dignified cousin, the deliciously viperlike Marquise dEspard (Jeanne Balibar), who conceals her venom behind a condescendingly courteous exterior.

The opera sequence should make you squirm as it shows the still-sincere Lucien humiliated in the snake pit of Parisian aristocracy. Americans love a rags-to-riches story, but class barriers are far less permeable in France, and the film depicts Lucien and later punishes him for taking a shortcut to the top. There are aspects of Citizen Kane in his story, especially in its skeptical view of the press, though the outcome is not so dire. Balzac believes in reinvention, treating Luciens Parisian experience as a moral education.

When writing fiction gets Lucien nowhere, he resorts to waiting tables, befriending a regular newspaper editor Etienne Lousteau (a terrific Vincent Lacoste) whos figured out how to make a living with his pen. Recognizing a more naive version of himself in the kid, Etienne takes him in and shows him the ropes. His job, Etienne explains, is to make newspaper shareholders rich and rake it in, and rake it in they do, accepting donations in exchange for articles and favors for rave reviews.

Both men are condescending toward the prostitutes they see in Paris streets, ignoring the irony that theyre even more compromised themselves, peddling their prose to the highest bidder. At this precise moment in French history, their influence is invaluable, and Etienne uses his to boost the prospects of his ingnue girlfriend an example Lucien soon follows, trying to bury his feelings for Louise in the comforts of Coralie (Salom Dewaels), a boulevard actor making her debut on the legit stage. As a try-out piece, Etienne invites Lucien to review her show, and his conflict-of-interest assignment sets both of their careers on an upward trajectory.

An aficionado of all things theater, director Giannoli (whose version of the Florence Foster Jenkins story, Marguerite, is better than Meryl Streeps) illuminates for audiences how shows fortunes were made or broken through paid applause and bribes. Two hundred years later, the practice hasnt disappeared, only gotten more sophisticated. Fascinating though Coralies world may be, she feels like a distraction to Luciens sidelined literary ambitions and his love for Louise.

Through Etienne, he meets a publisher (Depardieu) and comes to admire a rival writer, Nathan (Dolan), who serves as his conscience. Lucien finds himself in the position to destroy his rivals latest novel, but rather than whack it for hes no better than a junior mobster at this point he recognizes its merit and spares the book. For his other sins, Balzac doesnt let Lucien off so easily, but that one act of mercy may well be the thing that redeems him in our eyes.

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Lost Illusions Review: Blistering Balzac Adaptation Reminds That Fake News Is Nothing New - Variety