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