Xavier Giannoli, winner of the César for best film on Friday for “Lost Illusions”, an adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s great novel, has become a filmmaker of illusion over the course of his filmography.
From “When I was a singer” (2006) to “At the origin” (2009), “Marguerite” (2015) or even “L’Apparition” (2018), this literary and thoughtful director explores the mechanisms of deception and beliefs.
In reality, most of his films, although all singular, could have been called “The Lost Illusions”, the title of his eighth feature film.
This adaptation of the eponymous novel by Balzac, who has lived with him since he was 19, was the favorite of the Césars in 2022, with 15 nominations. His film ultimately received seven statuettes.
Its hero, Lucien de Rubempré, is a little poet from Angoulême who has gone to Paris to seek fame, but quickly becomes a disillusioned journalist evolving in a world of the press plagued by lies and false pretences.
As an epilogue, Xavier Giannoli pinned this sentence taken from Balzac’s correspondence: “I think of those who must find something in themselves after disenchantment”.
“This sentence haunts me and upsets me,” he confided to Figaro. “I feel like she sums up the story of our lives.”
Thus, Rubempré could well be the brother of Alain, the aging ball singer played by Gérard Depardieu in “When I was a singer”; or the brother of Philippe, the impostor swindler played by François Cluzet in “A l’origine”; the brother of the singer with the rattling voice played by Catherine Frot in “Marguerite” or even the brother of Anna, the young girl who saw the Virgin in “L’Apparition”.
“This story of beliefs is linked to my very progressive and at the same time Christian upbringing”, explained the director on France Inter. “All my characters have a desire for elevation, for beauty, but at the same time they are grounded by their condition as human beings, their bodies (…) the world as it goes”.
– “Desire for human truth” –
“Tumultuous Christian”, Xavier Giannoli was born into a bourgeois family: he is the son of Paul Giannoli – a journalist who notably directed the JDD and Télé Star – and the grandson of Roger Frey, Minister of the Interior of De Gaulle.
A former altar boy, it was thanks to the singer Christophe, the neighbor of the family apartment on Boulevard Flandrin, that he discovered the cinema.
“At his house, I entered a magical and transgressive universe, of jukeboxes and film, in a setting of black sofas and lamps. You never knew if it was day or night”.
After the baccalaureate, he enrolled in letters at La Sorbonne because the university “was surrounded by cinemas”, then this enthusiast of Maurice Pialat made short films with film scraps. Until obtaining the Palme d’Or with “The Interview”.
Chance of life, it was his other master Martin Scorsese who gave him this distinction in 1998.
With little money, he produced his first feature film in 2003, “Les corps impatients”, a story of love and death in which Laura Smet plays his then companion, kidnapped at the age of 20 by cancer. “During the ten years that followed, my life was organized around this drama”.
In 2005, “An adventure” is a furnace. He rebounds a year later with “When I was a singer”. His work therefore becomes that of “a filmmaker inhabited by a desire for human truth”, he explained in the notes of intent of “The Apparition”.
“Cinema is the art of illusion par excellence”, he admitted recently. At the same time, I believe that romance and illusion teach us about reality at least as much as an investigation. We surely approach the complexity of life more through the romantic or cinematographic illusion”.
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