France’s César-winning critique of ambition and journalism
At last, a film version of Honoré de Balzac’s 1843 novel Lost Illusions opens, precisely when we need it. The story of provincial naïf Lucien (Benjamin Voisin) who writes poetry, wants to enter the beau monde of Parisian society, then is seduced and shocked by its corruption is a perfect mirror of our disillusioned times. No wonder Xavier Giannoli’s adaptation won the César Award as Best Film of the Year; the French film industry’s recognition that Balzac got to the truth of today’s moral calamity has no equivalent in America’s self-deluded film culture.
Most period movies are an opportunity for escape into a fantasy past, but Giannoli presents Lucien’s tale, which takes place after Napoleon’s 1815 fall, with wide-eyed, how-the-world-works wonder. It’s a series of revelations about the pretenses of provincial life, followed by the brazen hypocrisies of urban sophistication.
Lucien trades his desire to be a poet for print-media hackwork. His introduction to journalism reveals a world out of whack and becomes a moral education. Giannoli and Balzac show us what’s behind the façade of professional expertise and social power.
The period setting allows just enough distance from our horrified mirror-awareness. We absolutely relate to Lucien’s opportunistic association with publisher Dauriat (Gérard Depardieu), his friendship with the hustling writer Lousteau (Vincent Lacoste), and two crucial romantic heartbreaks — at first with the deceitful village aristocrat Louise de Bargeton (Cécile de France), then the simple-minded stage actress Coralie (Salomé Dewaels).
An update of Balzac would risk inviting the very self-saving flattery that is the object of the film’s exhilarating critique. Consider how contemporary movies as far apart in production as All the President’s Men and Spielberg’s The Post actually stand ideologically side by side, both defending institutions of power. But Giannoli’s rowdy press-room atmosphere contradicts the cathedral-like setting of All the President’s Men. This barroom–stock market environment is the turf of hustlers — minus the comic heroism of 1930s newspaper movies. (Giannoli’s montage explaining the history of “claques” and “The Glory Machine” should be mandatory for every journalism student and media fanatic.)
Lost Illusions exposes the roots of journalistic corruption, finding it in the beau monde’s ruthlessness and Lucien’s ambition. He is instructed, “A new industry was born. Editorial press became commercial press . . . a shop that sold the public what it wanted to hear. One no longer enlightened. One flattered opinion. Or created it.”
Giannoli’s narrator lays out press performance in Balzacian details that sound absolutely contemporary:
News, debate, and ideas had become goods to palm off on subscribers. Journalists had become retailers of phrases, wheelers and dealers of words, brokers between artists and the public. Lucien wrote with the fury of revenge. Cruel, witty articles became his trademark.
We even learn the roots of fake news:
There was a specific term for any false information — a “canard,” or duck. Maybe because fake sensational news was like a wild duck chase.
For this fake-news era, when one longs for a writer with principled courage rather than mere audacity — a Tom Wolfe no less — Giannoli grounds these modern observations in what Balzac called La Comédie Humaine. The film’s immediacy suggests a neoclassical version of Le Gai Savoir, Godard’s analysis of media language.
The perfectly cast actors humanize what would otherwise be caricature. Voisin’s Lucien has the corruptible aspect that Hayden Christiansen brought to Anakin Skywalker, matched by Dewael’s scarlet-stockinged Coralie. She inspires Lucien’s “overwhelming desire to throttle this world,” yet both share poignant destinies. Their doom is predicted in De France’s perfect stone face and Depardieu’s worldly vulgarian; both personify the manipulation of naïveté and innocence.
American filmmakers might think they’re superior to what Balzac knew. That’s why Hollywood has not produced a media satire that stings. (Even Network is smug and self-congratulatory.) But in Lost Illusions, Balzac examined exactly that kind of arrogant moral stupidity, especially the stupidity of corrupted information. Godard and Truffaut knew this; their films internalized Balzac’s wisdom. And Giannoli proves worthy when, during the blistering social panorama equating journalistic misbehavior to prostitutes, theater, and the banking world, his roving camera rises to a theater ceiling to reveal a fresco of puppets pulled on strings — the peak of the director’s technique.
V. S. Pritchett heralded Balzac as “an indefatigable observer of a greedy age.” That seems prophetic when Lousteau teaches Lucien, “My job is to make newspaper shareholders rich. And along the way rake it in.” We are disabused of contemporary journalism’s sanctimony. Giannoli uses art against dishonest journalism, the main weapon in today’s politicized class war. No documentary could be more bracing. That makes Lost Illusions the best newspaper movie since Citizen Kane.
