Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticIn France, the names Rastignac and Rubempré serve as a kind of shorthand even today — two iconic characters who signify opposite sides of the same vice: Both prominent players in Honoré de Balzac’s expansive “La Comédie Humaine,” the ambitious parvenus are virtual nobodies of vaguely noble extraction who arrive agog in early-19th-century Paris, and compromise their way to the top.