Honore de Balzac must have owned a time machine. When he wrote “Illusions Preludes,” there was no internet or Twitter or talk shows devoted to “hot takes;” there was no Stephen A. Smith yelling about Lebron James; there was no Tucker Carlson yelling about Hunter Biden. And yet he wrote a novel about that very same subject 200 years ago?
An assured and eerily prophetic work, “Illusions Preludes” is one of the great social satires and a potent meditation on the power of fame to corrupt and create, to divide and demolish. It is the kind of novel that doesn’t get written very often and when it does, it rarely gets transferred to the screen with the kind of intensity and devotion we find in this adaptation. As directed by Xavier Giannoli, from a script by Jacques Fieschi, “Lost Illusions” is one of the few adaptations that provide a classic book with a welcome update. A rich, old-fashioned story spun out of modern themes and postmodern storytelling, this film’s decade-long, country-wide examination of art, life, love, and, yes, illusion, has the kind of tone that brings to mind “The Sweet Smell of Success.” It’s a film of smirks and surprises, not least of which is that director Giannoli has taken this material and given it a tragic spin.
We meet Lucien (Benjamin Voisin) in a small town where he works at a factory by day and writes poetry by night. Tangled up in ink, daydreams, and the wistful winds of youth, he sets off for Paris where the best writers do their best work, but he quickly realizes that no one will hire him and his lover, Madame Louise (Cecile de France), is ready to leave him because of his lower-class status. Unable to publish his work, rejected by Louise, and sent to live in a motel, he settles for a job at one of the filthiest, most scandalous spots in town: a newspaper. There, he gets an introduction to how journalism really works.
The papers aren’t interested in reporting on the news. Rather, they sell their work to patrons who want to promote their product or take down their competition, who in turn are trying to take down their competition. The writers are merely there to lend humor to whatever target they’ve been given, and Lucien soon becomes a theater critic and takes on a sort of Tony Curtis/Sidney Falco trajectory, one of boundless fame but zero integrity. The film jumps from his years as a newbie to his years as a veteran, from the lovers who get in his way to the friends who get in his bag, including novelist Nathan (Xavier Dolan) and editor Etienne (Vincent Lacoste).
Fieschi’s script, dense with dialogue both witty and childish, is a well-oiled machine, hopping between the significant moments of Lucien’s life like a family photo album. However, the movie puts Balzac’s work first and foremost. Fieschi throws plenty of shade at papers that use headlines for clicks, often paired with modern slang and lingo to underscore just how ahead of his time Balzac was. These sequences, including an editor leading a toast to “bad faith, rumors and advertising,” call our attention to the film’s inherent playfulness, and Fieschi never misses an opportunity to poke fun at people modeled after contemporary figures. The meta-awareness of Giannoli’s filmmaking brings the audience’s attention to the current state of journalism more than it does the state of journalism in 1830.
The treatment of characters like Louise also adds to the film’s commentary. While Lucien still harbors feelings for Louise, he criticizes her family so he can sell more papers. “Lost Illusions” isn’t the kind of movie to let Lucien off the hook, though, and Giannoli weaves together moments of tragedy in service of a cold, bleak and romantic ending. Voisin is endlessly engaging in the part, and Giannoli’s portrait of today’s journalism and yesterday’s culture couldn’t be more timely–or depressing. One wonders how Balzac could have written such a text 200 years ago, and if he indeed somehow got his hands on a time machine. Or, perhaps, things never really change. [B+]