The Work­shop

This is the first film Lau­rent Can­tet has made in France since his 2008 Cannes win­ner The Class, and a lot has changed since then. We’re post-Bat­a­clan, post-Nice, and with sup­port for Le Front Nation­al ris­ing. Where his pre­vi­ous sec­ondary school por­trait took the country’s pulse in its day, to find him work­ing again with the same French-Moroc­can screen­writer Robin Campil­lo, and anoth­er bunch of teenage non-pro­fes­sion­als in the cast, is cer­tain­ly a promis­ing prospect.

How­ev­er, it should be said that this is def­i­nite­ly not The Class 2, but shaped around a some­what loos­er dra­mat­ic con­struct as a way of address­ing the hopes and fears of young folk in an evi­dent­ly divid­ed nation.

The set-up this time is a work­shop where a bunch of kids are due to turn out a col­lab­o­ra­tive nov­el, super­vised by Mari­na Fois’ mid-rank­ing con­tem­po­rary writer. Not sure whether we or they ever real­ly believe that’s going to hap­pen, and since we’re in the social melt­ing pot of La Cio­tat on the south coast, it’s an excuse to bring togeth­er kids from var­i­ous eth­nic­i­ties, reli­gions and social back­grounds. A deci­sion to pen a who­dun­nit based in their home­town gets us root­ing around in the place’s indus­tri­al decline and its impact on the mixed work­ing-class populace.

Mod­er­ate­ly inter­est­ing, then we’re exam­in­ing how the teens’ notion of sto­ry­telling draws on video games, action movies and social media, rather than lit­er­ary sources or clas­sic cin­e­ma. Uh-huh, fair enough. And just when the whole thing’s start­ing to feel like some mid­dle-class intellectual’s idea of what’s hap­pen­ing with today’s youth, the mid­dle-class intel­lec­tu­al writer her­self gets upbraid­ed for her pre­ten­tious lit­er­ary efforts and sub­se­quent­ly con­fess­es to her edi­tor that she’s hav­ing trou­ble with the ado­les­cent pro­tag­o­nist of her new book.

Even­tu­al­ly, we get out of all this fog and a nar­ra­tive thrust emerges, focus­ing on Matthieu Lucci’s dis­af­fect­ed white lon­er. He’s into body-build­ing, and his con­tri­bu­tions to the work­shop lead him to con­stant­ly goad his Arab and black class­mates, sug­gest­ing polit­i­cal views lean­ing severe­ly to the right. His big idea for the book is a mur­der­er who kills for the thrill of killing. Need­less to say, teacher finds him fas­ci­nat­ing, and Lucci’s clenched, flinty per­for­mance is eye-catch­ing indeed. But weren’t they meant to be writ­ing a book or something?

As the film wan­ders around in search of itself, it’s emi­nent­ly pos­si­ble com­mend Can­tet for attempt­ing a sort of unclas­si­fi­able essay-doc sus­penser, but that would be to ignore the mount­ing exas­per­a­tion prompt­ed by its essen­tial­ly hol­low cen­tre.
There are things to admire here, since it flags up enough hot-but­ton issues to qual­i­fy as a cred­i­ble state-of-the-nation snap­shot. Fois does a com­mend­ably sub­tle job as the teach­ing try­ing not to show her frus­tra­tion at the class going off-mes­sage, while Cantet’s mul­ti-cam­era tech­nique cap­tures every nuance and gesture.

But as a whole it’s a bit like one of those dish­es in a cheffy restau­rant, where the descrip­tion sounds entic­ing, it all looks great on the plate – and then turns out to not taste of much at all.