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Old Goriot (Le père Goriot, 2004) Director: Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe Mister Goriot was a wheat trader and a pasta manufacturer. He has lost all the money he made out of the Revolutionary wars because of his daughters. However, his passion for them is blind and obsessive. He has done everything in his power to give them the best education and enable them to gain a brilliant position in the world. He has succeeded. Anastasie has married an aristocrat and Delphine a banker, the Baron de Nucingen. Now, Old Goriot lives very modestly in a boarding house run by Mrs Vauquer on the hill of Mont St. Genevieve. The residents include the law student Eugène de Rastignac, a mysterious agitator named Vautrin, and an elderly retired vermicelli-maker named Jean-Joachim Goriot. The old man is ridiculed frequently by the other boarders, who soon learn that he has bankrupted himself to support his two well-married daughters. Rastignac, who moved to Paris from the south of France, becomes attracted to the upper class. Rastignac endears himself to one of Goriot's daughters, Delphine, after extracting money from his own already-poor family. Vautrin, meanwhile, tries to convince Rastignac to pursue an unmarried woman named Victorine, whose family fortune is blocked only by her brother. He offers to clear the way for Rastignac by having the brother killed in a duel. Rastignac refuses to go along with the plot. Before long, the boarders learn that police are looking for Vautrin, revealed to be a master criminal nicknamed Trompe-la-Mort ("Cheater of Death"). Goriot, supportive of Rastignac's interest in his daughter and furious with her husband's tyrannical control over her, finds himself unable to help. When his other daughter Anastasie informs him that she has been selling off family jewellery to pay her lover's debts, the old man is overcome with grief at his own impotence and suffers a stroke. |
