'Lost Illusions' Movie Review

Here's the strange trick of Lost Illusions. You sit down expecting a lavish period film (gilded salons, gas-lamp Paris, women in silk gowns being hauled through doorways by impatient lovers) and within twenty minutes you realise you're actually watching a film about your own timeline. About paid promo posts. About the guy who got famous for shredding a movie on TikTok. The costumes are 1820s. The behaviour is yesterday.

Xavier Giannoli's adaptation of Honoré de Balzac's Illusions perdues, the centrepiece of Balzac's sprawling Human Comedy cycle, won seven César Awards in 2022 (including Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Supporting Actor for Vincent Lacoste). It earned every one of them. The film draws mostly from the second volume of Balzac's three-part novel, titled A Great Man of the Provinces in Paris, and the title is already the joke. Lucien thinks he's about to become a great man. Paris has other plans.

Benjamin Voisin plays Lucien de Rubempré, a provincial nobody with a borrowed aristocratic name and the face of a Romantic painting. He arrives in Paris as the kept lover of Madame de Bargeton (Cécile de France, sharp as a paper cut), gets unceremoniously dumped within his first week, and then stumbles into a far more interesting world: the booming Restoration-era tabloid press. This is where Lost Illusions really comes alive. Vincent Lacoste plays Étienne Lousteau, a hashish-smoking journalist who initiates Lucien into the trade. Lacoste won the César for it and you understand why the second he opens his mouth. He's playing a man who has already lost his soul and is mostly just curious to see how long it takes Lucien to lose his.

The casting coup, though, is Xavier Dolan. Yes, that Xavier Dolan, the Québécois enfant terrible who made Mommy and Matthias & Maxime before he was thirty. Here he plays Nathan, a serious novelist Lucien betrays for a paycheck, and he also handles the film's voice-over narration. Critics at Cineuropa clocked the trick immediately: the narration carries the same dry, knowing register as Goodfellas and Barry Lyndon, except the racket being explained isn't the mob or the British aristocracy. It's the press. There's something genuinely funny about hearing a director famous for excess and emotion deliver Balzac's icy social commentary like a man explaining how the sausage gets made. Trivia worth knowing: Nathan is actually a composite, fused from three separate figures in Balzac's novel.

What Giannoli does formally is the reason this doesn't play like a museum piece. Christophe Beaucarne's camera (he won the cinematography César) doesn't sit back and admire the costumes the way most period films do. It's right inside the scrum. There's an extended sequence at a theatre where the camera weaves between paid clappers (the claques) and paid booers waging war over a single performance, and the editing is so frenetic it plays like a heist movie. The film's defining image of corruption isn't a back-room handshake. It's a man named Singali (Jean-François Stévenin) who runs a small army of professional hecklers and whose price list determines whether a play lives or dies. It's influencer marketing, basically. With shouting.

Voisin is the revelation. He'd just had his breakout in François Ozon's Summer of 85, and this role asks something completely different of him. He's charming for the first hour, calculating by the second, and by the time we hit the third something has shifted behind his eyes. There's a long take during a banquet scene where a drunk Lucien literally walks across a dining table while his patrons cheer, and you can clock the precise second something inside him breaks. He won the Most Promising Actor César for it, which is almost too modest a category. He's better than promising.

The honest gripe, since this is a review and not a press release: the narration is a lot. Multiple critics have pointed out that Giannoli doesn't always trust his own images. Some scenes get a voice-over that explains exactly what you're already watching, and for a film this visually confident it can feel like being elbowed by your friend during a movie you're already enjoying. Salomé Dewaels, who plays the actress Coralie (Lucien's true love and easily the film's emotional anchor), occasionally gets sidelined by all the macho journalism business, which is a real shame. She's doing some of the film's best work in fewer scenes than she deserves.

These are quibbles in a film that fully earns its 149-minute runtime. The other thing to watch out for is Gérard Depardieu's brief, fully unhinged turn as Dauriat, an illiterate publisher who can't read the books he sells but has a sniper's instinct for what will move copies. He's in maybe ten minutes of the film. He walks out with three of them. There's also a recurring sight gag involving a parrot that you'll only fully appreciate on the rewatch. The film's score, by the way, leans on Bach (the Concerto in A minor, BWV 1065) in a way that's almost mocking. The 19th century never sounded so smug.

The other thing about this film, the one that sticks with you days later, is how funny it is. Not just witty. Properly funny. The mechanics of the Parisian press circa 1821 (the bribes, the rigged reviews, the entire economy of manufactured opinion) are played with a kind of glee that recalls early Scorsese. Giannoli isn't scolding. He's grinning at the same scam we're still falling for. Lacoste's Lousteau in particular is a comic creation as much as a tragic one, and his late-film face-offs with a now-corrupted Lucien have the bitter pull of two friends realising they've ruined each other.

Watch Lost Illusions if you've ever rolled your eyes at a glowing five-star review of a film that didn't deserve it, or wondered who's paying for all the noise online. Balzac wrote this story between 1837 and 1843. Two hundred years later somebody adapted it and the only thing that needed updating was the camera technology.