is a journalist and philosopher of technology with degrees from France’s École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and HEC-Paris, where she specialised in innovation and media, before joining Philonomist’s editorial team.
Picture: © CP
Xavier Giannoli’s film revisits Balzac’s novel Lost Illusions but updates its message, substituting fulfilment at work with the temptation of private happiness. In cinemas, the main character (Lucien de Rubempré) is well and truly our contemporary.
A handsome young man stands before a quiet lake, the sun gently caressing his shoulders. “He had stopped hoping,” a narrator’s voice explains. “He could now start living.” Thus ends Xavier Gioannoli’s ambitious adaptation of Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837), the story of a gifted but sensitive poet (Lucien de Rubempré) from south-west France who follows his patron (Louise de Bargeton) to Paris. Abandoning the verse to take up journalism, he soon shows a gift for cruel witticisms of the kind that do or undo a person’s reputation. But the cruelty of Parisian life combined with his lack of judgement prove to be his undoing, destroying his lover, Coralie, and forcing him to move back to his hometown of Angoulême. “Hope keeps us going,” as the French say; but it destroys us when it turns us away from reality, which is made of sweat, tears, death, and treachery. To face up to it, what attitude should we take? This is where Balzac and Giannoli differ: for the former, salvation is to be found in hard work; for the latter, you need to retreat from the world.
Hard work or authenticity?
Giannoli’s film portrays Lucien's journey as an inevitable fall from grace. It watches like a slow-motion car crash. There seems to be no way for the hero to escape the pitfalls of his provincial naivety and the intrigue of big city life. The final quote shown on screen rings like a cynical sentence, or perhaps a sarcastic one: “My thoughts go to all those who must find it within themselves to overcome disillusionment.” “Good luck with that!” we’re tempted to reply, at the start of a year marked by a neverending pandemic, environmental crisis, and upcoming electoral division… What inner resources can we draw on, in order to keep our head up?
In the novel, Balzac gives us a direction to follow to overcome disillusionment: willpower and hard work. He suggests that Lucien could have fulfilled his artistic ambitions had he really wanted to. Success is possible if you give yourself the means. To illustrate this idea, he develops a second narr…
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