Film review

  • The Workshop

    Old YorkerFilm review

    L’atelier

    Laurent Cantet (2017)

    In The Workshop, Laurent Cantet refashions the teacher-student dynamic he dramatised so successfully in The Class (2008).  Olivia Dejazet (Marina Foïs), a successful Paris-based novelist, comes to the seaside town of La Ciotat to run a creative writing workshop for a group of local youngsters.  One of the students is Antoine (Matthieu Lucci).  He soon becomes unpopular with the others:  his suggestions for the story the group develops are variously vicious and repeatedly racist.  Although Olivia doesn’t like Antoine, she’s increasingly interested in him.  The feelings are mutual.

    La Ciotat is a real place – a port in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of southern France.  Its place in cinema history was secured more than a century ago:  the town’s railway station is the setting for the Lumière brothers’ famous fifty-second film of 1895, showing the arrival of a train.  The economy of both the real La Ciotat and The Workshop‘s version of it once depended on shipbuilding.  The naval dockyards closed in the 1980s.  But whereas La Ciotat today is typically described in online travel guides as ‘a hub of trade and tourism’, Cantet characterises it as a place fallen on hard economic times and, as a result, a breeding ground for resentful, internet-fuelled right-wing activism.  The Workshop was shot in and around the actual La Ciotat presumably during the summer of 2016 – in other words, about the same time as the Islamist terrorist attack on Nice and a few months before Marine Le Pen didn’t, as some feared she might, win the 2017 presidential election.  According to Wikipedia, the name ‘La Ciotat’ means ‘the city’; perhaps Cantet is exploiting that to present La Ciotat as a representative French municipality of today.

    The Workshop keeps moving into familiar territory then heading in another direction that’s unsurprising in itself but unexpected because of what went before.  (The screenplay is by the director and Robin Campillo, who, as usual, is also Cantet’s film editor.)  Some of the behaviour of Antoine’s right-wing acquaintances and the ethnic diversity of his fellow students, in combination with the plotting of the story being developed in the workshop, prepare the ground for a violent confrontation that doesn’t materialise.  Although Antoine is outstandingly hostile, others in the writing group are irritated by Olivia’s posh metropolitan lifestyle and that she has (as they see it) taken on the assignment in La Ciotat out of feelings of noblesse oblige.  The experience of the workshop and of Antoine in particular causes Olivia to question her own ability to write and her motivation for writing.   For a while, this seems to be the film’s main subject – then it turns into a creepy stalker thriller.  These changes of tack are immediately effective in disorienting the viewer but it’s not clear if this is what Cantet intends or if he just can’t decide what kind of story he’s telling.  Although The Workshop is consistently entertaining, it spends plenty of its running time in what turn out to be blind allies.

    Cantet retains his gift for ‘classroom’ drama on screen and the film is cinematic, thanks largely to the spectacular landscape surrounding La Ciotat and to the visualisation of Antoine’s sense of escape, whenever he’s in the sea, from the life he loathes on dry land.  Even so, you wonder if The Workshop might have been more compactly claustrophobic as a single-set stage play, with the developing threat contained within successive scenes at the workshop.  A theatre might also be a better place for Antoine’s farewell monologue to Olivia and the group.  (The students are a cross-section of, for Cantet, conveniently distinguishable types:  beyond that, I was never clear of the selection criteria for the workshop.)

    As the dislikeable Antoine, Matthieu Lucci does well in a challenging role, especially as the script forces him to play most of his cards early.   Lucci has a really good moment when a local television crew is filming a piece about the writing class:  as Antoine listens to what Olivia is saying to an interviewer, you get a sharp, sudden sense that he wants to be part of it – he then checks himself and normal, scowling service is resumed.  Cantet finally seems to decide that Antoine’s main problem is that he’s dangerously bored but, if so, why is he the only one in the group with this problem?  Does Cantet mean him to be a typical product of circumstances or an aberrant case study?  Either way, the extent to which the outcome downplays the threat of right-wing extremism seems, in view of the socio-economic context Cantet sets The Workshop in, complacent.

    19 November 2018

     

  • Beau Travail

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Claire Denis (1999)

    Inspired by Billy Budd, Claire Denis’s Beau Travail takes place in present-day Djibouti, where Herman Melville’s sailors have become soldiers in the French Foreign Legion.  Chief Adjutant Galoup (Denis Lavant) is the protagonist in Denis’s and Jean-Pol Fargeau’s screenplay and more sympathetically treated than Master-of-Arms Claggart, his equivalent in the original set-up.  Galoup’s commanding officer is Lieutenant Colonel Forestier (Michel Subor).  The Billy Budd equivalent, a newcomer to the section of legionnaires, is Gilles Sentain (Grégoire Colin).  Unlike the cast of Peter Ustinov’s shipbound 1962 film of Melville’s novella, Beau Travail’s features women, albeit in minor parts.  They include an African girl (Marta Tafesse Kassa) with whom Galoup goes out dancing, when he and his men are off duty.

    There’s plenty of choreography – in Denis’s presentation of the legionnaires’ training exercises, as well as the brief sequences in local dance clubs.  Her strong visual sense includes a fine eye for colour that keeps coming through – in descriptions of Djibouti social life, the red terrain seen by the soldiers from a train window as they travel to the area, the play of light on water.  Denis’s and her DP Agnès Godard’s observation of the legionnaires’ bodies at work (especially during an assault course sequence) and at play (swimming in the sea) is often imaginative and arresting.  Had the director concentrated on images to the virtual exclusion of non-visual narrative conventions, the film might have been more demanding to watch but easier to admire for the novelty of its approach.

    She doesn’t, though.  She also has Galoup narrating events in recollection, from his home in Marseille, where he’s writing a memoir.  It isn’t something you’d expect this wiry man of action, for whom military service has been not just a way of life but a raison d’etre, to be doing.  Galoup comes up with insights like ‘I admired him without knowing why’ (of Forestier) and ‘That day something overpowering took hold of my heart’.  Another day brings the sense of ‘something menacing’.  His inability to analyse his impressions reinforces the puzzle of why he’s putting pen to paper in the first place.  Claire Denis’s recourse to Galoup’s voiceover is frustrating.  Denis Lavant doesn’t need it:  his face and body in the Djibouti scenes tell us more of what the character is experiencing inside his head than retrospective words do.  It would be different if we got a sense of  Galoup’s exasperation at not being able to make verbal sense of his feelings; all that we actually get is woolly phrases like the ones quoted above.  Galoup’s imposed reflections do no more than dilute the force of his hostility towards Sentain by trying (though failing) to articulate it.

    Those familiar with the Ustinov film will have a good idea of what drives antagonism towards its title character.  Just as well because Galoup’s animus is unaccountable in the wrong way: unlike Terence Stamp’s Billy, Grégoire Colin as Sentain doesn’t stand out as exceptionally beautiful and charming.  Perhaps Denis means to exploit the idea that military service de-individualises those partaking of it.  In any event, Nicolas Duvauchelle (in his film debut) was the only member of the group who registered with this viewer – and I already knew him from other roles.  Michel Subor does solid work as Forestier but Denis Lavant’s extraordinary presence dominates.  His charismatic Galoup eclipses Sentain, which contradicts an essential theme of the material.  A major plot difference is that Sentain, in spite of Galoup’s efforts, survives.  Grégoire Colin’s lack of vitality makes this matter less than it surely should.

    Denis includes excerpts from Benjamin Britten’s opera of Billy Budd on the soundtrack – just the thing to earn her cultural brownie points but otherwise meaningless.  The only exciting music comes in the last scene, which is also the only bit of the film I wished had gone on for longer.  Denis Lavant performs a characteristically acrobatic solo dance in a Djibouti night club to Corona’s ‘Rhythm of the Night’.  The preceding scene in Galoup’s lonely room in Marseille indicates that he’s about to end his life with the pistol that he’s clutching.  In this final, mysterious sequence, which follows (playing over the closing credits), there’s a real synergy of sight and sound.

    I disliked both the Claire Denis films I’d seen previously (White Material and Let the Sunshine In) but felt I should try this one, which is widely regarded as her masterpiece.  Duty done, I can give her other work a miss.  ‘Remorse is the beginning of liberty’, says Galoup’s voiceover at one point.  He then repeats this aperçu, adding ‘I heard that somewhere …’  It was probably in a French movie not unlike Beau Travail.

    16 November 2018

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