THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – “NOT TO BE MISSED”
Lost illusions, Giannoli found. The eighth feature film by the French director with a sawtooth filmography, since Impatient Bodies (2003), When I was a singer (2006), Daisy (2015), is undoubtedly his most successful work. Its staging electrifies the spectator, sending him back two centuries while making him hear what links the time of the Restoration (1814-1830) to the XXIe century.
The virtuosity of the actors, the fluidity of the rhythm and the image with the slightly distorting beauty, as if coming out of a bad dream, plunge us into the bubbling and corrupted bath of the Parisian scene of the 1820s. Here we are at the roots of commodification. , where everything is paid for and minted, where careers and reputations are made and undone, depending on the setbacks of alliances and low blows orchestrated by politicians and a dormant press. The “best” feathers sell to the highest bidder and rewrite history, in defiance of their information mission – the “fake news “ before the hour. We will find other nods in these Lost illusions. As the thinly veiled allusion to Emmanuel Macron, a former banker who became Minister of the Economy, in 2014, before being elected President of the Republic, in 2017.
The Lost illusions arrive in theaters on October 20, when the performances of the play of the same name, written and directed by Pauline Bayle, at the Théâtre de la Bastille have just ended in Paris (a tour is scheduled in the region). The playwright chose the outline of a performance for five actors, who play around twenty protagonists. Nothing like it in the sumptuous film which brings together a bunch of actors of French cinema – Vincent Lacoste, Jeanne Balibar, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Gérard Depardieu, Jean-François Stévenin… – to which is added the Canadian filmmaker and actor Xavier Dolan .
Some freedoms
But Giannoli’s best intuition is to have entrusted the role of Lucien to a new talent with fiery elegance, Benjamin Voisin, the mouth of an angel with a dark face, revealed in Summer 85 (2020), by François Ozon. The director places him at the center of the device, like a magnet, the other protagonists interacting and pulling the strings of his meteoric rise, then of his inevitable fall. Benjamin Voisin gives Lucien, an idealistic poet but also eager for success, all the grace, arrogance and melancholy that make his fabric and his armor. It is another young actress with an intense presence, Salomé Dewaels, Dionysian beauty, who plays Coralie, in love with Lucien and actress with a broken destiny.
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