Lost Illusions – Flamboyant and Boring – Herodote.net

October 20, 2021: this film, inspired by Balzac’s great novel, is not yet on the screens that all the good press has already drowned it. Good for its director Xavier Giannoli, whose film we really liked Daisy (2015) with Catherine Frot in the role of a failed singer.

For our part, we will forget these Lost illusions, despite the inspiration that the director went to Barry lindon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975). Benjamin Voisin, in the role of Lucien de Rubempr, is very far from the cunning of Ryan O’Neal in that of Barry Lindon and the two hours that his comings and goings in Parisian newsrooms last seemed to us to be much longer than the three hours run Europe with the Irish.

Lost illusions is one of the most important novels of the Human comedy, the great work of Honoré de Balzac, both in size (over 1000 pages) and in intrinsic quality. The novelist published the book in 1836-1843, during the reign of “Bourgeois king” Louis Philippe but he places his action under the reign of Louis XVIII and the Restoration, a parliamentary system which reserves the right to vote to a narrow handful of notables. Public opinion was at the time, in France, at most 200,000 people.

This is the time that saw the birth of the romanticism, a revolutionary literary current in the style and conservative in politics in which Hugo and of course Balzac are illustrated. It is also the time that sees reborn the opinion press after the brief revolutionary episode, before fully flourishing under Louis-Philippe with in particular the arrival of advertising and serial novels at the initiative of Émile de Girardin, who founded Press in 1836 … the year of Lost illusions.

We owe to Balzac the expression of ” fourth power “ about the press (note). He uses it in 1840 even as he writes and publishes Lost illusions, which is essentially devoted to it. It is true that a statesman like Adolphe Thiers will owe his entire career to his talent as a journalist. It is by writing incisive articles and by publishing large successful works under the Restoration that he will enter in 1830 in the small circle which makes and undoes the regimes. In addition to being smarter, less poet and much less handsome, Thiers is a Rubempre who succeeded.

Was it therefore necessary once again to adapt Balzac to the cinema?

The novelist refrains from long sentences or hazy concepts to describe this world of the press which he both abhors and adores. It remains anchored in the concrete and it is this concrete that leads the reader to a more conceptual perception of the environment. Here is for example how the journalist Étienne Lousteau, cynical among all, expresses his hopes: “When, instead of living with Florine at the expense of a druggist who gives himself the air of a milord, I will be in my furniture, which I will pass in a large newspaper where I will have a soap opera, that day, my dear , Florine will become a great actress; as for me, I do not know then what I can become: minister or honest man, everything is still possible. “

The film focuses on the Parisian episode, the one that sees the hero burning his wings in the journalistic world. The director strives to respect Balzac, for example in the sequence where Lucien, just landed from his province, is invited to the Opera by his mistress Louise de Bargeton and shows himself to be ridiculously complete.

But as much the novel is read with lightness despite the large number of pages, as the film is bloated in the images and pontificating in the formulas, with the voice-over (Xavier Dolan) who never ceases to discuss the power of press, corruption well known to journalists, the importance of money, shareholders and “Claim” (advertising), etc. It is to the point that we sometimes have the impression of being in a documentary ofArte Where France 5 with a voice over on silent sequences.

Regardless of the film, whether we go see it or not, the opportunity is good to read or re-read Balzac’s masterpiece. It is accessible online in full version in the excellent Electronic Library of Quebec. Is there a need to insist? It is far more entertaining and easy to read than most of our current novels, to say nothing of the political essays.

What if we went to see Eugenie Grandet ?

Eugénie Grandet, film by Marc Dugain, 2021 Chance of the calendar, three weeks before Lost illusions, we were treated to the much more discreet release ofEugenie Grandet.

Marc Dugain adapted without stylistic effect but without boredom and with the right amount of emotion this other Balzac novel, which tells the misfortune of a young girl victim of the extreme avarice of her father. Nice acting performance by Olivier Gourmet in the role of this former Jacobin taking the greatest care to conceal his immense wealth from everyone, including his family.

Here is a film to see in family for a discovery of the Balzacian universe, with its provincial notables of the Restoration (1815-1830) attached to the rent, to the land and to the property wealth, light years away from the industrialists of the Second Empire (1851-1870) or the Trente Glorieuses (1944-1974).

André Larane

Posted or updated on: 2021-10-20 10:21:28

What if we went to see Eugenie Grandet ?

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