Lost Illusions in Cinema: The Rise and Fall of a Writer-Culture

Being critical can be that simple sometimes. Especially when it comes to destroying authors and their works. Because the critic knows he can turn everything into its opposite. If he is affected by a work, he writes that it is emotional. If a book is written in a classic and simple style, it is traditional. The critic finds the text funny? The text is ridiculous! Confusion unpredictability, clear structure predictability, etc. are renamed.

Lucien Chardon (or Lucien de Rubempré, as he also calls himself) learns this lesson fairly quickly. The most feared critic of Paris is the main character in Lost Illusions, the famous novel by Honoré de Balzac that Xavier Giannulli made into a movie. This is France Restoration, in the era before the July Revolution of 1830. Lucien (Benjamin Voisin), a young provincial writer and poet, follows his noble mistress to the capital in search of poetry, beauty, and love.

But her ideals soon turn out to be the lost delusions of the title. Lucien cannot gain a foothold as a writer, and in other respects he also falls out of favor: his lover leaves him, his aristocratic mother-in-law let him fall. The young man ends up in the gutter and as a bartender in a notorious student bar. There Lucien becomes acquainted with the editor-in-chief of a liberal newspaper, who will expel his noble literary ambitions and divert him to tabloid journalism – a real gold mine for the writing guild of that time.

Lucien started his career as a theater critic. His first script is not about stage play that no one cares about, but about the actress’s red stockings: a stark declaration of her desire to sleep with her. The plan works and Lucien gets a job at the newspaper as well as being a stocking lady. From then on he incited his enemies with a sharp pen and wrote poetry for his friends with a flowery pen.

Until then, nothing sells without Shitstorm

But who is friend or foe is determined only by money. Because in this world where everything is for sale, newspapers and journalists are paid by those who write about them. Book publishers, authors, directors, theater actresses, oligarchs, and bankers put a lot of money on the table for courtesy texts and positive reviews, as well as for showcasing their competition—and sometimes even about themselves: without arguing, without a dirty storm, nothing selling, no plays, no books. False reporting and defamation are part of the daily work of this corrupt opinion journalism, which has consistently abandoned principles of truth.

Lucien becomes rich and champagne flows in torrents until things go downhill again. Until then, the film emulates the frantic energy of Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street in its extended moments, and the candlelight of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon in its contemplative moments. Gérard Depardieu sways as a heavyweight publisher, while French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan lends his delicate facial features to a regal writer. It’s all fun and nice to look at. And yes, this circa-1820 world of Parisian journalism, with its cult of buzzwords, provocations, and opinions, reminds us of that discourse hell called Twitter, even before Elon Musick took over. The interest economy in the nineteenth century is a little different from our economy today.

However, the movie is still stuck in the past. On the one hand, because the times mentioned here, when prints grew and advertising business flourished, are too late for newspapers in 2022. In addition, we no longer need a fashion film to raise a mirror to our media world. We are no longer under any illusions about what Twitter and the like can do.

Delusions of pornography, France 2021. – Directed by: Xavier Giannulli. Writers: Jacques Ficci, Giannulli. Camera: Christophe Bokeren. With Benjamin Voisin, Cécile de France, Gérard Depardieu, Xavier Dolan. A 150-minute movie. Theatrical show: December 22, 2022.