Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Benjamin Voisin, Cecile de France, Xavier Dolan, Salome Dewaels, Gerard Depardieu
Intro:
… there are fine set pieces and nuanced exchanges, all uniformly well-acted by the experienced cast.
The 19th Century French literary giant Honoré De Balzac wrote about post-Napoleonic France with a steely eye. In his series of novels known as the Human Comedy, he settled for a position of celebrating courage rather than giving reasons for optimism. In his view, society from top to bottom was prone to cruelty, snobbery, and the exploitation of weakness. Director Xavier Giannoli has certainly captured some of this in his lavish and skillful adaption of Lost Illusions. The film is beautifully done but all the characters behave in such a way that we doubt whether any of them is really worth saving.
At the centre of the novel/film is Lucien (Benjamin Voisin), a young poet feeling the stirrings of a literary sensibility. He also feels trapped and wants to outgrow his regional origins. He carries his father’s surname, but his mother’s background was more aristocratic and that is the key to the identity that he aspires to. He adopts her name, but the traces of his father’s name never disappear. At this point, his path crosses that of the high-born Louise de Bargeton (Cecile de France). She is amused by the young would-be poet and they have a liaison.
Lucien leverages this to get himself to Paris, where he hopes to become famous. He falls in with Nathan (the French-Canadian actor/filmmaker Xavier Dolan) who introduces him to the world of criticism and journalism. From here on in, we see that almost everyone is either trying to flatter and connive their way to the top or is cutting deals which advance themselves at the expense of others. Lucien falls for a sweet aspiring actress called Coralie (Salome Dewaels) who is just about the only person in the whole story with a good heart. More importantly, she is someone that you do not have to scrape away the artifice to get to her true nature.
Because of the constant plotting and the obsession with name dropping and social protocols, you have to concentrate for the whole two and a half hours to keep on top of it. Life lived at this level of self-consciousness must be quite exhausting. It also means the film must resort to occasional voice overs and expositions, which a novel would handle less obtrusively. That said, there are fine set pieces and nuanced exchanges, all uniformly well-acted by the experienced cast. Even the cameo from the ubiquitous Gerard Depardieu as the grasping editor manages to not unbalance things.
The lighting and the period costumes and the locations are also flawless (Paris is one place where you really can film this stuff without having to rebuild all the stately homes and palaces). Good acting and these superb production values will no doubt secure a willing audience and critical praise and, if you are in the right mood, that might be enough. Even if you come away feeling, like the now-wised up hero, that these people ought to stop pretending and start living.
