User reviews

Lost Illusions is a movie adaptation of the classic novel by Honoré de Balzac. The movie follows the young poet Lucien de Rubempré, who naively leaves his hometown in pursuit of becoming an author. I haven't read the novel, but I understand the movie does an excellent job of staying true to the source material. Unfortunately, the constant narration can be quite tedious. It's as if the viewer isn't trusted to understand what's going on without being spoon-fed every detail.

The acting is solid all around, but the standout performance is by Benjamin Voisinas as Lucien. He perfectly captures the naïveté and arrogance of the character. The movie is also visually stunning, with opulent costumes and sets that transport the viewer to 19th century France. The dialogue is fast-paced and witty, but it can be difficult to follow at times. There are some very funny moments, but the movie is a tragedy more than a comedy. It's a long movie, but it's worth watching if you're a fan of period dramas.

Even though the movie is set in the 1800s, it has a lot of relevance to today. The portrayal of journalism and the literary world is just as relevant now as it was then. Fake news was a problem back then and the movie is a reminder that some things never change.

Lost Illusions is a well-made movie and worth seeing if you're a fan of the novel or period dramas in general. I'd give Lost Illusions a higher score if the narration weren't so heavy-handed.

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.

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.

Lost illusions is for many critics, the best Balzac's novel and the adaptation that Xavier Giannoli (the director) delivers is not only fairly pleasant, dynamic and very well interpreted, it also has a special resonance in our world controled by social networks, search for buzz, influencers, fake news and a few rich media owners.

However, the story seems quite far from our world as it takes place in the first part of the 19th century (around 1820-1830) during the period of "Restauration", when monarchy came back to power in France but also when the liberals were pushing for changing the regime or at least experimenting new liberties such as parliamentarism and freedom of the press.

Lucien de Rubempré is this young man full of dreams who comes from the French country side eager to live from his literary talents, driven by his forbidden love to a rich aristocrat . Sent away to Paris, little by little Lucien will lose his illusions to discover a world full of greed, machiavellianism and dishonesty.

Xavier Giannoli tackles lots of topics in what we understand is a very rich novel. One of the topic is the transformation of literature into merchandise. The depiction of the book publishers is machiavellian. The depiction of a new kind of journalism based on sensacional news is quite shocking. In fact, Xavier Giannoli doesn't make a plea for journalists, on the contrary, he even tries to discredit them and presents them as filthy people, greedy for money. It's sometimes a little bit too much but we understand that the new liberties conceded by the government back in those days have a repercussion on different fields of the society and we also understand it concerns a certain type of journalism and not all journalisms. However the resonence in our 21st century world is quite obvious concerning the search of buzz.

We clearly understand that what the director wants to make us some winks thoughout his film, winks that the attentive spectator cannot miss. There is notably the explanation of how the buzz is created among the press, but also how the media (for the time, mainly newspapers) are controlled and owned by rich entrepreneurs or by the big bosses of advertising agencies and how these influencers of the 19th century try to invade the parliament and get the hold of the main positions among the government. The sentence "there will be a time a bankier will be president of the republic" is clearly a wink to our French president Macron, former banker himself.

All in all, Xavier Giannoli makes a great adaptation, with a lot of characters and a fine depiction and understanding of the changes that were at stake back in the 19th century and that have a special resonance nowadays.

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.

I was looking forward to seeing this film, and the first half is extremely good indeed, especially on its observations that without being ' known ' or have people rooting for you you stand very little chance in either getting into the so-called literary world and into journalism. I could smell the corruption just by watching the screen. It was like this in the Bourbon era and so I feel it has been for a long while. So what went wrong for me ? The force of the story carried the film, despite the fact that the direction seemed very conservative. Fine images at times, but not really that spark that showed a new voice in the cinema. My mind often wondered back to the 1950's and the very long adaptation of ' Le Rouge et le Noir ' and the blandness of the direction then. And yet despite doubts I thought I would give this film a higher rating. Xavier Dolan was much, much better than the lead Benjamin Voisin, who often failed to convince me he merited the role of Lucien and I thought it a pity Dolan was just that much older for the part. Apart from him and the excellent Vincent Lacoste I found the casting weak and that applied sadly to the female actors. Where are the actors like Riva, Seyrig, and Huppert to take these parts ? I have thought this over carefully and that is my honest opinion. The ending after a very long film seemed rushed and the final scene was literally a washout. But all that said the first half is very fine and has a truth to it that castigates French society, then and now.

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.

The quality of the movie is high and it is always full of emotions until the last minute. The meaning is wisdom, because life is often like this, in a world full of many evil people and so many low quality people ... wolves that tear apart other wolves. Art is often bought, even today. Excellent film with some problems in some scenes and some actors.

Xavier Gianolli's breakthrough film may at first glance to seem like, ho-hum, another period costume drama. But that's before you realize that the source is Honoré de Balzac (as with his hero here, the aristocratic "de" was self-attributed), the merciless dissector of society's corruption and malice.

The period in question (one that isn't often seen in films or novels) is that of France under the post-Napoleonic Restoration of the monarchy, likely during the reign of Louis XVIII, who allowed a measure of post-revolutionary freedoms to persist until pressure from the ultra-royalist faction became irresistible and led to a crackdown. Physical details and social relations are, as far as I can tell, depicted with rigorous fidelity, including in the musical background, drawn from that period and from the preceding century - Vivaldi and Rameau to Mozart and Schubert.

The story line, based faithfully on one of Balzac's greatest works, follows a well-trodden path: provincial boy dreams of turning his good looks and his modest gifts as (in this case) a poet into a life of love, fame and fortune. External forces conspire bring him to Paris, where he plunges into a snakes-and-ladders ascension, casting aside caution and ever more scruples until his presumption (both social and artistic) is, inevitably and crushingly, exposed. (Coincidentally, the Metropolitan Opera has just ended a brief run of Stravinsky's marvelous opera "The Rake's Progress", whose basic plot line, taken from what today we would call a graphic novel of the same name by the XVIIIth century engraver William Hogarth, tracks eerily with Balzac's - but of course with so many others' as well.)

The film is dazzlingly well acted by everyone involved, starting with the handsome Benjamin Voisin as Lucien Chardon, a callow pharmacist's son (who assumes the name Lucien de Rubempré, thus signalling his pretension to an aristocratic background that the real aristocrats quickly catch on to and do not forgive), whom others play like a violin to achieve their own, usually foul, aims. His sudden transformation from innocent, awkward, likeable provincial into an absurd fop is stunning to behold. His moral innocence is washed away just as quickly, but he is never clever nor evil-minded enough to keep up with those with power and far greater experience who, for an array of reasons, pull puppet strings to ensure his destruction.

Paris, both among bohemian (but always cynical) littérateurs and unscrupulous journalists and publishers (with a scenery-eating cameo by Gérard Depardieu as a successful publisher who can neither read nor write but who has an unfailing sense of what will sell), is shown to be a machine for crushing innocence, ambition, and talent - a place where all that matters is your connections, your ability to please, and your willingness to achieve your ends by whatever means. Prostitution is universal, and everyone, not just the city's many overt sex workers, is prostituted in one way or another.

It's a wonderfully gifted cast, including the particularly wonderful Cécile de France as the aristocratic deus ex machina whose lust for Lucien sets the plot in motion; the earthy Salomé Dewaels as Lucien's true love (she will surely be going places after this); and a host of journeymen and women from the deep well of French acting talent. All take their roles with gusto and real depth. Every face, even in crowd scenes, is expressive, every nuance (so important amid such highly codified social constructs) is pitch perfect.

Jeanne Balibar as the Marquise d'Espar is the terrifying arbiter of all the nuances and proprieties by which everyone else is assessed as belonging to proper Society, or, in most cases, not. And special notice must be taken of a stunningly understated performance by the young Canadian wunderkind actor and director Xavier Dolan, not until now known for understatement. Yet here he is, a darkly recessive, chillingly alert and watchful presence -- and, boy, does he nail his role as the agent of Lucien's nemesis. Kudos also to Vincent Lacoste, until now only seen in unambitious soap operas and telefilms, who does a wonderfully engaging turn as the Lucien's hash-smoking mentor, initiating him into the dark arts of journalistic prostitution, revealing to him the ease with which, if one is only willing to be unscrupulous and clever enough, one can use the dark arts of fake news to casually destroy lives and careers while gaining wealth.

Beautifully filmed, perfectly paced, this takes the best of the Jane Austin films, for example, and gives them a Gallic (and so, of course, cynical) twist. Balzac's is a world of endless fake news and mindless ambition, in which there are no happy endings, and in which the tragedies of others are merely the subject of tight self-satisfied smiles. Jane's world, in which an ambitious young woman can in the end become the master of at least part of her fate, is far away. This one is a lot closer to ours, and this film might just be "La Règle du jeu" for our times.

PS on accents: For perhaps understandable reasons, the historical verisimilitude is cast aside when it comes to speech. Thus not only does Xavier Dolan completely drop his Québecois accent (so pronounced in his own films), but he and everyone speaks the French equivalent of the King's English -- in this case perfect, modern Parisian. I must go back and see if Balzac says anything on the subject, but Lucien is from the Charentes, in southwesstern France, and would have arrived in Paris with a very pronounced accent which would instantly have exposed him as a provincial (to the literary world) and a commoner (to the aristocratic one). Understandably, the film doesn't go there, but it's worth reflecting on why.

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.

After a long hiatus since the pandemic, I made a return to the cinema notably to catch up with #lefrenchfilmfestival. Most of the films I would say struggled to justify your time in the cinema indulging in such frivolity but this one particularly stood out.

I am not familiar with and have never read Balzac but I reckon this film gives you a glimpse of his genius and why he remains a giant in French literary circle, not merely for prose or poetry but for his devastatingly incisive social commentary still relevant today.

And one couldn't help but feel despite our technological advancements and having totally plundered the planet, from a moral standpoint the world hasn't progressed not even an inch today and remains mercilessly mercenary under a veneer of righteousness as Balzac had so accurately depicted some two centuries ago.

Dazzlingly executed with a superb ensemble of cast, illuminating performances, a production nothing short of breathtaking and lashings of Baroque including the less often heard Jean-Philippe Rameau, the film remains and stays with you long after you have left the cinema.

France, 1820s. A young poet, Lucien de Rubempre, moves to Paris with the aim of being published. After a few menial jobs he finds work as a journalist, an art critic. Here he sees the corruption and influence of the press and how to play their game.

Interesting, thought-provoking...and a little disappointing. I watched this because it is based on a de Balzac novel but set my expectations rather low before watching this. It appeared to be a period piece potentially revolving around the social mores of the time. These sorts of movies always bore and frustrate me as they usually involve some sort of Machiavellian scheme or humiliation that rests on something really arbitrary by today's customs but usually ends up in someone killing themselves or dying in a duel in the movie.

The first few scenes hinted that this was the path it was going to take but then thankfully de Rubempre whisks himself off to Paris and the story starts in earnest.

Things get really interesting once he becomes a journalist and we see the corruption of the press, how they create news rather than report on it, how controversy, even when based on lies, sells. Sound familiar? Yes, you could easily shift the setting to the 21st century and it would be incredibly accurate.

So what we have is a study on the media and how its as bad in reality in the 21st century as it was in a fictional novel set in the 1820s.

Unfortunately, this great examination and condemnation of the media doesn't go anywhere. Rather than continue to stick the knife into the media, the second half of the movie follows a more subdued, less pointed, course. It ends up more a Machiavellian period piece than an evisceration of the media. It's also drawn out unnecessarily.

The ending is reasonably profound and uplifting though.

So a bit disappointing in that it got my hopes up by the halfway mark and then disappointed me but still quite interesting regardless.

A classic novel, but filmmakers chose to show MANY graphic sex scenes and a close up of a penis. It's hard for me to understand why a close up of a penis is necessary for a classic novel like this.

I started to read "Lost Illusions" once and didn't get very far. Not that I thought it was bad, but rather that I just wasn't in the mood for Balzac's style of writing just then. I'll probably revisit it some day.

So I can't speak to how good an adaptation this movie is, but man is it a good movie in its own right. I love stories about women in big dresses and men in cravats exchanging significant glances in drawing rooms, which is pretty much all this movie is. The young actor Benjamin Voisin carries this movie admirably on his slim shoulders, and the whole thing is a scathing indictment of the relationship between journalism, wealth, and power. It's eye opening, not necessarily because it's surprising, but because it makes Paris of the 1800s relevant to the world of 2023.

And I don't think I've ever seen a more effective and artistic closeup of male genitalia in a film before. The juxtaposition of a fistful of money against a male penis says in a single image what Balzac spent pages and pages communicating to his readers.

Grade: A.

I was a little scared before watching this film; I was scared to get bored, because romance in costume is not my stuff. Speaking of costume movies, this is not BARRY LYNDON but a captivating French film, which could have been made seventy years ago by an Albert Lewin, starring George Sanders, except maybe that the lead character here is not as nasty, selfish, cynical as Sanders was in his films, and mabe not only in his films... This is the itinerary of an idealistic young man, not naive but ambitious, who tries to survive in the Paris jungle: journalism, theater, publishing, politics, a cruel, superficial, cynical, rotten, insecere, opportunist world where sharks spread everywhere. I guess Claude Chabrol could have made it too, and I think Xavier Gianolli is an authentic heir ofChabrol. It is brilliant, sensitive, bittersweet and full of details of the atmosphere of this period. Adapted from Honoré de Balzac, this would be great if this kind of films could be made about more novels from Balzac or even Zola, why not? This is millions of times better than stupid French comedies for red necks where you need someone near you to tell you when to laugh. It is after all a rise and fall scheme, which makes it more interesting.

A young provincial aspiring poet. A marquise patron married to a much older man. A grocer's editor who can't read or write. An unscrupulous journalist at a time when freedom of the press was confused with lack of ethics.

The homonymous film adaptation of one of the most celebrated novels by Honoré de Balzac (Illusions Perdues, 1837), an integral part of the writer's comédie humaine, invites us to witness the decline of Lucien de Rubempré, played by the young actor, Benjamin Voisin, who I already knew from SUMMER 85 (François Ozon, 2020), so it didn't surprise me that he managed to take such a long and intense story upon his shoulders.

In LOST ILLUSIONS (Xavier Giannoli, 2021), Lucien de Rubempré (Voisin) dreams of becoming a recognized poet, arriving in Paris eager to make his literary talents known. However, the illusion is quickly replaced by the temptation to indulge in the easy life of a sensationalist journalist.

Throughout the film, the dialogue with the present is evident and we can easily see that the director intends to bring to the 21st century a veiled critique of the journalism that is practiced today, superficial and not very rigorous, as well as a society dominated by greed and absence of moral values. As the book says, "both the political law and the moral law were disowned by everyone; opinions belied by conduct and conduct by opinions".

As for Julien, even involved in the nastiness of Parisian society, still has a certain naivety, which leads him to be entangled in a web of Machiavellian plans that manipulate his destiny as if he were a puppet.

"Like any story of a rural youngster trying to make good in a major city, where Lucien aspires to pursue his vocation and earns his footing, the ups-and-downs of navigating a path through a classist, venal society (here a 19th-century Paris) are full of revelations, compromises and traps. Lucien's rapport with Mme. De Bargeton sours when his low-born status gets him shunned by the snooty silk-stocking crowd (among which, Balibar's imperious Marquise d'Espard is the class act, frictionlessly conveying veiled contempt and darting dismissive glances with such indelible finesse), his integrity disintegrates in the course of earning his name through yellow journalism, his genuine love with a plebeian stage actress Coralie (a voluptuous, plump-faced Dewaels) is doomed by malady and profligacy."

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Xavier Giannoli's adaptation of Balzac offers a masterful period piece set in Paris in 1820s following the steps of young Lucien who dreams of being a famous writer. As he struggles through artistic merits, class discrimination, sexual awakening and corruption, also he faces the manipulation of art, media and finance. The lost of innocence goes along with story of Lucien (brilliant act by Benjamin Voisin) which puts one's mind so many references to current media world. Winner is the highest bidder whether it happens to be art and entertainment or simple news. Art directing is wonderful so are the main cast. The voiceover narrative in this movie becomes a perfect choice. Fake news, fake applause! "Illusion perdues" unfolds many storylines related to past and present, and deserves to be seen again and again.