Illusioni perdute

It's very rare to be able to watch a 2h long literature movie without getting bored at any point.

Great cast, great adaptation of dialogues that make it a modern adaptation of Balzac while still translating the soul of it.

I won't repeat the storyline here as that's already been covered by many others. Lost Illusions is a visually sumptuous film throughout. I did notice that all of the camera work is quite tight, with very few if any longshots. As such it can feel slightly claustrophobic, if by design or chance I'm not sure. I'm not suggesting it a positive or negative, just an observation. I generally liked the male performances, especially Voisin does a nice job. Salome Dewaels does a very fine job as well but I feel the two other female performances were both a bit constrained. Several viewers took issue with the volume of narration - to that I feel there might have been a couple of instances of this, ever so slightly, but for the most part I have no major issues with this element. Lost Illusions is a beautiful and interesting film worth checking out.

The French cinema "de qualité" was heavily attacked by "nouvelle vague" critics back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. While many of the masters of the preceding decades were no longer giving the best of themselves (with the usual exceptions, such as Renoir or Bresson), the reason for the ridicule was the urgency that the critics (Godard, Truffaut, Rivette et al) had to make their own movies and with their writings they tried to "overthrow" the classics, who were too old to engage in diatribes and humiliations.

The worst of the case is that today we can take works by Clair, Duvivier, Carné or Clouzot and discover magnificent, beautiful, and lustrous films that those angry critics discredited. That cinema "de qualité" accompanies French cinema since cinema is cinema, it is not always of "quality", but there are outstanding works. What is ironic, furthermore and to the point, is that the new French cinema, despite the awards and praise given by festivals and the new critics, alienated the public from the cinemas en masse, Panama included, which had the Teatro Presidente, an exclusive theater for brand new European cinema.

And even more ironic, it is the return to the vein of "quality" cinema. In this category we can add «Illusions perdues», a film based on the novel by Honoré de Balzac that, in the last edition of the César award (supreme prize of the French film industry), it won five distinctions, including best film and screenplay based on another media (adaptation).

Everything is beautiful in the film, including the cast, everything is magnificent, from listening to Gérard Depardieu's hoarse, spirited, and passionate voice as the literary editor who cannot read or write, to Christophe Beaucarne's beautiful images (awarded the César). The weight of the film falls on a cast of young actors, possible big names of the future, who perform with equal panache and skill among veterans.

The anecdote of the film (and the novel) does not propose anything that has not been told before. What makes it very interesting is the social, media, labor, political, economic contexts - in a word, cultural - and their parallel with the present: Lucien de Rubempré is a young man from Angoulême, a country boy with immense poetic talent, to whom society denies him even the option of using his mother's last name, Rubempré, as "nome de plume", which would give him access to an estate, a place at the court and a noble title.

Lucien de Rubempré (Benjamin Voisin, who was 24-year-old actor when playing the role, winner of the César for Best New Actor) not only falls into the corrupt circles of Paris, with their vices and bad habits, he not only exercises vile and caustic journalism , but he literarily does not create anything beyond his book of poetry, written when he was 20 years old. In Paris he comes into direct contact with the city (at a time when the Bourbons were restored to the throne, betraying the ideals of the 1789 Revolution) and falls in love with Coralie, a young and beautiful theater woman, despised as an Andalusian and an actress. The film describes, with the aesthetic rigor that characterizes French cinema and with a current tone, the Parisian world at the beginning of the 19th century, that of the press, critics, publishers, authors, playwrights and the most rogue courtiers that, in their "salons" and circles, scheme to stay in power and marginalize the triumphant bourgeoisie.

The young cast includes Vincent Lacoste (Cesar winner for Best Supporting Actor) as another country boy, hashish smoker and unethical journalist; Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan as a talented novelist whom Lucien is able to destroy with one of his cruel and malicious reviews, who ends up being his only friend (and apparently his secret admirer) and Salomé Dewaels as Coralie, the young actress who adores Lucien and is reciprocated.

Lasting two and a half hours, «Illusions perdues» is a model of academic and prestige cinema for exportation, which does not skimp on details, evocations, reconstructions and becomes one more example of how European cinema represents itself better than Hollywood's attempts , tinged with a certain vulgarity, such as «Desirée», with a ridiculous Marlon Brando nasally applying "the Method" to evoke the image of Napoléon Bonaparte; or as «Dangerous Liaisons», with John Malkovich trying to give us, by means of the usual tics (possibly also of the "Method"), an 18th-century Parisian gentleman.

It's a 600 page novel that had to be boiled down to fit the running time of 2 1/2 hours, some minor characters had to be thrown out. The third part of the book is dispensed with--no great loss.

We are left with a wonderful satire of the popular press in France circa 1830. Graft and bribery are part of the game, and our hero Lucien is never quite sure where the next knife is going to come from that will enter his back. My favourite character is Sarfati, the claque leader, whose mob can be bought for whomever pays top dollar. The acting is superb, as you might imagine: Depardieu, de France, de Lenquesaing all acquit themselves well, and Vincent Lacoste as Lucien's changeable buddy Lousteau is marvellous. Only Benjamin Voisin doesn't quite meet the demands of the role, and he's in almost every scene. Sets and costumes are very good, and Giannoli's direction is assured.

I'm not against the use of a narrator in a movie by principle. Narration can be useful to set context, or, even better, have an interesting dialogue with the action. However, I struggle to understand what the writers of this movie were thinking when they decided that every beat of this story needed narration. I felt like I was reading a picture book. It really diminished my enjoyment of the movie. Too bad, because it's a good story, served by excellent actors (I particularly loved Salomé Dewaels) and beautiful costumes and sets. A lot of the narration could have been cut by being more creative with the script and telling us things in different ways, or by simply leaving a few things unsaid and trusting the audience to cope with some ambiguity.

I'm frankly baffled by the fact that it won the "best movie" and "best adapted scenario" César awards (admittedly, I haven't seen its competition).

Also, the little nods to our present time, mostly done by that same narration, were very unsubtle. In a better film, I might have funnier, but there they tended to annoy me.