With his “Eugénie Grandet”, on Canal+, Marc Dugain revisits Balzac in feminist mode
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CANAL+ – SATURDAY AUGUST 20 AT 11:00 P.M. – FILM
We’ve never finished with Balzac. Her human comedy remains the sharpest scalpel to dissect our time. At regular intervals, the directors remember it. This is how this new adaptation ofEugenie Grandet : the trajectory of this small idealistic provincial mowed down by the patriarchy still concerns us, necessarily.
Marc Dugain makes the work more romantic than it is, even if it means brushing against a form of sentimentality foreign to Balzac
In Saumur, in the 1820s, Eugénie (Joséphine Japy) suffocates, immured alive under the yoke of Félix Grandet (Olivier Gourmet), a miserly father who supports his family as if he were poor. Eager to link the fate of their son to this young woman who does not know that she is rich, local petty bourgeois speculate on her dowry while she believes she sees her salvation in the oaths of love of a cousin from Paris, an orphan and ruined dandy who will upset the life of Eugénie and her paternal domestic tyrant.
While sticking to a meticulous reconstruction of the period, the filmmaker and writer Marc Dugain – author of The Officers’ Room (Jean-Claude Lattes, 1998) andAn ordinary execution (Gallimard, 2007), which he himself brought to the screen in 2010 – takes the opportunity to slightly inflect the tone of the novel, the story of a dream of love that clashes with the stinginess of reality. He makes the work more romantic than it is, even if it means brushing against a form of sentimentality foreign to Balzac, and translates it into the terms of a contemporary feminism which offers its heroine a much happier and emancipatory outcome.
Extreme formal preciousness
“Balzac had a very strong awareness of the condition of women in his time. Marc found this very subtle path between a period language and a more modern language”, said actress Joséphine Japy when the film was released in September 2021 – a month before lost illusionsdirected by Xavier Giannoli, who triumphed at the Césars in Februarywinning seven awards including Best Picture and Best Male Newcomer for Benjamin Voisin25 years old, interpreter of Lucien de Rubempré. “I took a few modernization liberties, of course, but nothing anachronistic, nothing that distorts the text”explained Marc Dugain to The Cinema Front Stagein 2021.
In this new adaptation, it’s less the agreed, slightly opportunistic rereading that poses a problem than the director’s extreme formal preciousness: it’s hard to find what makes cinema here, as everything is purely illustrative. Candlelight, costumes, direction of actors, chiaroscuro of the image: the filmmaker takes such care in the reconstruction that he forgets to stage – that is to say, to film ideas .
This preciousness in the execution prevents the film from being traversed by a breath, a radiance, a face or the tremor of an emotion. So many affectations which, far from exalting the firepower of the novel, stifle its flame under layers of academicism.
Eugenie Grandet, a film by Marc Dugain. With Joséphine Japy, Olivier Gourmet, Valérie Bonneton (Fr., 2021, 105 min).
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