Bolshoi Performs Ratmansky's "Lost Illusions" at Paris Opera Photos Damir Yusupov As if they were lifted straight from a Degas painting: members of the Bolshoi in a ballet studio scene from Alexei Ratmansky's production of "Lost Illusions," at the Palais Garnier in Paris. PARIS - Story ballets. Three acts, characters, costumes, scenery, melodious music. Beloved by mass audiences, they've been unfashionable with current, forward-thinking choreographers for years. But there has been a sea change recently, a new interest in the plot-driven narrative ballet, and no one has been more important to that renaissance than Alexei Ratmansky, the Russian-born choreographer whose full-length "Lost Illusions," performed by the Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow, opened at the Palais Garnier here on Saturday night. Mr. Ratmansky, who has been the artist in residence at American Ballet Theater since 2009, was the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet from 2004 to 2008, and it was there that he began to make a specialty of recreating forgotten ballets from the Soviet era. These pieces ("The Bright Stream," "Bolt," "Flames of Paris") were the first full-length ballets in decades to show new possibilities within the form, and this had much to do with Mr. Ratmansky's ability to present a historical context while brilliantly deploying a ballet vocabulary to tell stories and display character. Watching a full-length work by Mr. Ratmansky is to see that traditional form within quotation marks. His pieces based on literature or existing libretti are not realist re-creations of particular eras, but visions of the past through the prism of the present. "Lost Illusions," inspired by the 1843 novel by Honoré de Balzac, is no exception. Set to a commissioned score by Leonid Desyatnikov, "Lost Illusions" was Mr. Ratmansky's first creation for the Bolshoi after his move to New York, and its premiere with the company in April 2011 came soon after the appointment of Sergei Filin as the company's artistic director. Last January, Mr. Filin was scarred and partly blinded in an acid attack that threw the ballet world into an uproar and caused serious turmoil at the Bolshoi. A former dancer in the company, Pavel V. Dmitrichenko, was sentenced last month to six years in a penal colony for ordering the attack. Mr. Filin, wearing dark glasses, was at the premiere on Saturday; a press representative said that his sight is "fairly good" in one eye, but that further operations are needed for the other. However, as a successful Bolshoi season in London last summer demonstrated, the show has gone on. The company looked in fine form in "Lost Illusions," which offers several important acting roles, as well as dramatic interpretive possibilities, to its three central characters. Mr. Ratmansky has followed a 1936 libretto written by Vladimir Dmitriev for a short-lived production by Rostislav Zahkarov at the Mariinsky Ballet in which Balzac's hero, Lucien, is a composer rather than a writer, and the central female characters, Coralie and Florine, are ballerinas rather than actresses. This enables Mr. Ratmansky to indulge his love of ballet history and extensive knowledge of bygone styles, since it is Lucien's compositions for two ballets-within-the-ballet that provide the pivotal moments of the narrative. The ballerina characters are incarnations of a real 19th-century balletic rivalry between Marie Taglioni, strongly identified with airy, romantic ballets like "La Sylphide," and the fiery Fanny Elssler, who specialized in Gypsies and other exotics. Coralie, danced on Saturday by the guest ballerina Diana Vishneva, is the Marie Taglioni type, and we see part of a "Sylphide" ballet that Lucien (Vladislav Lantratov) composes for her. Florine (Ekaterina Shipulina) is her earthy, seductive rival, and it is when Lucien succumbs to her charms and compromises his artistic ideals in creating a piece for her that the betrayal of his art is cemented. All of this is delightful for balletomanes, who can revel in Mr. Ratmansky's ingenious re-creation of these miniature ballets and the studio scenes that seem lifted straight from a Degas painting, with violinists accompanying the dancers and a stick-wielding ballet master (Yan Godovsky). That immediate impression of familiarity isn't just a function of the décor - sober, sepia-tinted re-creations of Paris facades, the ballet studio and Coralie's apartment - by Jérôme Kaplan, but also of Mr. Ratmansky's beautifully stylized choreography, which captures the slightly rounded shoulders and smaller-scale style of the period without sacrificing a more contemporary complexity or sophistication. These scenes - and, particularly, the "Sylphide" ballet, in which Lucien mirrors the movements of the Premier Danseur (the clean-lined Artem Ovcharenko), imagining himself the hero with Coralie - are wonderfully ingenious. Their period look is set against more conventional movements for Lucien and Coralie (the pas de deux are accomplished but unmemorable), and stylized, almost caricatural sequences for the ballet master and a choruslike cast of bystanders who move with staccato exaggeration. It's an interesting device, and it conveys a certain ironic distance, using a quick cartoon sketch to give an idea of period and type. The Bolshoi Ballet's performances of "Lost Illusions" continue through Friday at the Palais Garnier in Paris; operadeparis.fr/en/calendrier.