Bylines and betrayal in Xavier Giannoli’s Lost Illusions

DOES THE WORLD have any extra want for the Younger Man from the Provinces? That determine, as aptly outlined by the critic Lionel Trilling, describes a plethora of characters who populated nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, from Stendhal’s Julien Sorel and Flaubert’s Frederic Moreau to Dickens’s Pip and Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. He (and it’s virtually at all times a “he”) “stands exterior life and seeks to enter,” in response to Trilling; possessed of expertise and ambition however devoid of cash or pedigree, he depends on his crafty and wit to ascend the social ladder. The fortunes of the Younger Man from the Provinces, caught between the haughty stasis of aristocracy and the gauche tumult of democracy, listed the rise and fall of the meritocratic enterprise; his demise foreshadows the lack of mobility in a extra calcified period. By reviving him for his César-winning adaptation of Balzac’s Misplaced Illusions, a novel first serialized between 1837 and 1843, the French director Xavier Giannoli guarantees to look at his relevance to our instances.

Lucien de Rubempré (né Chardon) is a younger and hungry poet from the provincial outpost of Angoulême, born to an impoverished however noble mom and a pharmacist father. Armed with a quantity of odes and a turning into visage, Lucien (performed by the sprightly Benjamin Voisin, after his breakout position in Summer time of ’85) turns into enamored of the native patroness of the humanities, Louise de Bargeton (Cécile de France), leading to a scandal that sends each to Paris: Lucien to publish his poems, and Louise to enter Parisian society underneath the safety of her illustrious cousin, Madame d’Espard (Jeanne Balibar). That metropolis, portrayed with elegant interval element, constitutes the driving pressure of the movie, its charms and vices shortly luring Lucien away from his lofty ambitions; scorned by excessive society for his plebeian origins, he resolves to grow to be a journalist for his revenge. Giannoli colours the movie to evoke Paris’s champagne nights and ashen mornings, and the star-studded forged completely illustrates Balzac’s penchant for combining archetypal follies with particular person quirks: Voisin’s preliminary puppy-dog countenance, rising into an attack-dog sneer; de France’s radiant and self-delusional nation queen; Balibar’s puckered, wily d’Espard; and the Québecois director Xavier Dolan, who in a deft reversal performs not enfant horrible however society lapdog (and narrates the movie).

Misplaced Illusions could be not more than a fairly costume drama, nevertheless, if Giannoli had not picked up on the supply of Balzac’s kineticism, which stems much less from any of his particular person characters than the maelstrom of his time. Henry James remarked that the true protagonist of Balzac’s The Human Comedy, the sprawling forty-volume magnum opus that encompasses Misplaced Illusions, was the twenty-franc piece; right here, it’s additionally the print tradition coming into form, and Giannoli accordingly lingers on each poster and commercial plastered on the partitions, in addition to the churning, insatiable printing presses that blossomed in Restoration France. Balzac, along with his legendary urge for food, was virtually a pre-cinematic author—ensuring, for instance, to notice not solely who everyone seems to be in a room, however what they’re carrying and the place they purchased it from—which is maybe why he’s the patron saint of a sure lineage of French filmmakers (in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, the younger Antoine Doinel lights a shrine to his hero and virtually burns his home down).

Lucien befriends a younger journalist, Étienne Lousteau (Vincent Lacoste), and joins the ranks of his Liberal newspaper, Le Corsaire. Press freedoms had loosened significantly underneath the constitutional monarchy, and journals have been taking full benefit. It is a world during which every thing has a value, from applause at a theater (provided by the infamous and highly effective claque), to laudatory opinions and even hatchet jobs, which furnish sales-driving controversy. Lucien receives a impolite awakening from his idealism at a number of moments, none extra so than throughout a go to to an unlettered greengrocer-turned-publisher, Dauriat (embodied by a characteristically carnal Gérard Depardieu), who compares literary reputations to commodities on the inventory market, and broadcasts that “literature nourishes illusions; I imagine in pineapples.” If not totally trustworthy to the novel, Giannoli captures the totality of Balzac’s epoch with a suitably omnivorous gaze, reminding us why Marxist critics like Georg Lukacs and Frederic Jameson have been drawn to this most Royalist of writers.

In his earlier movies, Giannoli has displayed a persistent curiosity within the upkeep of illusions, from an opera singer who refuses to acknowledge her horrible voice to a teen who reviews an apparition of the Virgin Mary. These movies have been considerably wan, if solely as a result of their protagonists genuinely believed of their fictions (2015’s Marguerite is narrowly rescued by its Gilded Age interval setting and its lead actress.) They ended when their illusions dissipated. Misplaced Illusions, in contrast, begins with disenchantment. We by no means do discover out if Lucien is a genuinely gifted author; regardless of professing a love for literature, we hardly ever see him work on it, as an alternative attending lavish events, demolishing his enemies, and fascinating on the whole chicanery. His downfall arrives when he betrays the Liberals for the Royalists, underneath the false promise of authorized recognition of his mom’s surname.

“Except he was born wealthy,” the narrator warns, “each man has his deadly week.” The Younger Man from the Provinces naively believes that society, unshackled from hereditary privilege, will come to be organized in response to magnificence and intelligence; as an alternative, he shortly realizes the primacy of chilly, onerous money. With cruel precision, Giannoli captures first the giddiness of getting cash, then the giddiness of not having sufficient. Within the movie’s lone departure from realism, Lucien floats feverishly above an ornate desk as varied items—boots, books, pineapples—are traded throughout his prostrate physique. Giannoli accentuates Lucien’s disenchantment by domesticating his model of the poet; on the web page, he’s a extra cutthroat determine, dropping curiosity in Louise as quickly as he compares her with the belles of Paris. In his adaptation, Giannoli has made Louise extra alluring, Étienne extra unprincipled, and gotten rid of d’Arthez, a central determine in Balzac’s novel who represents the deserves of onerous work. The director stated that these selections have been made to minimize Balzac’s cynicism, however isn’t it extra cynical to imagine that sincerity and perseverance robotically equal boredom for the viewers?

That viewers is little doubt meant to attract parallels with the present authorities in France and its Restoration mentality, or to the appearance of “pretend information,” with the parallels between the nascent tabloid press of Balzac’s age and right now’s click-subservient media. But in some methods the press in Lucien’s day was extra sincere, and at the least promoting itself for a trigger. Giannoli offers his adaptation the sensation of a gangster movie, and, like all gangster movies, we find yourself sympathizing with the mob exactly as a result of we all know that the actual gangsters sit in boardrooms and put on fits and ties. In any case, it’s the Royalist paper in Misplaced Illusions which first claims to be “goal,” the higher to defend the established order. Lucien and his band of journalists’ dedication to fact was negligible, however their religion within the energy of language to reshape actuality was real. That capability to wield phrases as a weapon appears sorely missed in our age of puffery. Lucien may not have been a lot of a author, however he certain was one hell of a critic.

— Dennis Zhou

Misplaced Illusions opens in New York and Los Angeles on June 10.