Lost Illusions (2021)

Xavier Giannoli's adaptation of Balzac arrives draped in the respectable robes of a period literary drama, and for long stretches it earns them. Lucien de Rubempré, a provincial poet with more ambition than income, travels to Paris and discovers that the republic of letters is a marketplace where reviews are bought and reputations are rented. The film's true subject is money: the bribery, the cronyism, the patrons who purchase a young man's talent and his silence along with it. That indictment of commercialized culture runs through every scene, though it is an 1820s indictment, aimed at the press barons of the Restoration, not at any living billionaire. The rich are devoured, but only in period costume.

Viewed through the lens of contemporary social consciousness, the film is a near-total blank. Its cast is white and French, faithful to the source and to the demography of its setting, with a single supporting role offering any variation. Women occupy real space in the narrative, Anaïs and Coralie and the Marquise d'Espard all steer events, yet the camera stays fixed on a young man's ruin, and no thesis about gender emerges from it. Race goes unmentioned. So do the climate, the body, the mind's wiring, and any variation in desire. Balzac did not write those concerns into the 1830s, and Giannoli has not written them in either.

There remains the faint hum of topicality. The film's portrait of a news cycle that manufactures opinion for cash lands with a modern thud, and a viewer may hear the echo. But the echo is dramatized through character and consequence, never announced from a pulpit. It lectures by showing, which is the least objectionable way to lecture. The result is a handsome, rigorous, and ideologically quiet film, which trusts its audience to draw the parallel without assistance. In an era of instruction, that restraint is almost exotic.