The filmmaker, who won seven Césars for his adaptation of Balzac, is expected to release a feature film in 2025 or 2026 entitled Jean and Corinne Luchaire.
Like Honoré de Balzac, Xavier Giannoli is interested in the twists and turns and torments of our great human comedy. After revisiting the excessive ambition of the journalist Lucien de Rubempré with Lost Illusions (seven Césars, including that of best film in 2022), then the cynical greed of two VAT fraudsters on the carbon quota with the series Of money and blood (2023-2024), he will tackle the destinies of two figures of collaboration, the journalist Jean Luchaire and his daughter the actress Corinne Luchaire. Both will flee to Sigmaringen with a large part of the Vichy government and more than a thousand collaborators in August 1944.
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If we know the broad outline of the synopsis of this film which should be titled Jean and Corinne LuchaireXavier Giannoli and his producers have not yet revealed the names of the actors involved. With this new feature film with sulphurous overtones, the director ofLost Illusions tackles a controversial and, it must be said, inglorious part of French history, the pre-war period, the Second World War, the Liberation and then the purge, which saw a journalist, Jean Luchaire, move from the pacifist vision of an Aristide Briand to that of a Pierre Laval, a convinced supporter during the war of a collaborationist policy, that is to say openly pro-German.
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The fate of Corinne Luchaire, who will be the other side of this two-part historical biopic, was defined without embellishment by the extract from the synopsis of Giannoli’s film published by the specialist cinema website, Cineuropa: “Corinne, a rising actress between 1935 and 1940, briefly married to a German officer, shared her father’s flight to Sigmaringen, where she had become his secretary. She was sentenced to ten years of national indignity in 1946.”While waiting to learn more about the angle chosen by the scenario, Xavier Giannoli will have with this new highly flammable subject, the possibility of making a film which should cause a lot of ink to flow.
Lost Illusions by Xavier Giannoli in 2021, with Benjamin Voisin, Vincent Lacoste…