Championing self-definition and the right to personal liberty, liberals sometimes don’t anticipate the consequences. American conservatives and libertarians have written dozens of op-eds and columns reveling in the hypocrisy of liberal embrace of free speech so long as the speech agrees with the champion’s. But protesting repulsive ideas isn’t the same as quashing them — a distinction that often escapes these criticisms.
By observing the tensions that power the exchanges of a group of young writers, their coach, and one among them who flirts with fascist ideologies, the French film The Workshop addresses these questions in semi-coherent fashion. Although Laurent Cantet (The Class, Time Out) doesn’t lose his grip on the material, the movie left me unsatisfied; it pulls away from its study of a teen whose anti-human resentments give force to his prose, never mind whether we need yet another study of white resentment when sitting across from him are far more interesting students of North African descent.
One of the pleasures of Cantet’s films is their expert sense of geography. Set in La Ciotat, The Workshop situates its men and women amid the rocky coves and dusty trees of southern France. This once thriving port town has instead become a way station for the rich and their yachts, serviced by locals. Amid this serene decay sits novelist Olivia (Marina Foïs), whose weekly workshops require the sharing of polite demurrals (“I think what you did is really interesting…,” and, my favorite, “Writing is a good way to escape yourself”) and at which the dictum Write What You Know gets a good airing. There’s a lot to write about in La Ciotat, Olivia insists.
But Antoine (Matthieu Lucci) disturbs the peace, professing impatience with what he thinks is the squishiness of his mates, particularly when Malika (Warda Rammach) opens her mouth. A loner, Matthieu devotes himself on his off time to his body: incessant sit-ups, dives off the cliffs into what Scott Fitzgerald called the blue honey of the Mediterranean. When not skulking around with hoodlums in camouflage fatigues and mud-covered faces night he watches videos of white nationalist videos of the Marine Le Pen ilk clad only in underwear as if about to masturbate, in a blocking rather too on-the-nose for Cantet. Subtler is a sequence in which Pierre Milon’s camera hones in on Antoine’s pasty skin as the twaddle of rightist alarmism floats in voice-over.
Then Antoine presents his latest creation to the workshop: a short fiction in affect-free prose about a young male yacht worker who kills its owner, an Arab in a white djellaba. Infuriated, the group questions his right to write such a thing, which is, of course, exactly what the troll wants. Olivia, stuck as mediator, can offer little more than palliatives like, “I agree it’s a sensitive subject,” familiar to devotees of Sunday morning political talk shows whenever a host recoils from “controversial” topics. Antoine even goes for Malika’s jugular — why is she wasting time writing “floppy romances”? Olivia isn’t spared either. After she reads an excerpt from her novel, Antoine scoffs at her use of a pretentious word like “granular” over “grainy” (floppy romances or not, for these kids Camus remains a style guide, apparently). Curiosity and perhaps lust compel Olivia to take his suggestions seriously enough to re-think her latest book and, in the film’s longest scene, ask him to sit down for an interview for “research” purposes. A phone records the conversation, in case the police need evidence in a few months or years. Cantet is at his best in these scenes, thanks to co-scenarist Robin Campillo’s dialogue — recall that Campillo nailed the fraught dynamics of hastily assembled coalitions in last year’s wonderful BPM (Beats Per Minute).
With buckteeth, puckered mouth, and eyes shaded by the anticipation of offense, Lucci makes a solid debut. It’s not his fault that his character is familiar to those of us who suffer New York Times stories about the racism of rural Trump voters and the attendant mewling of centrists who think these people need courting. If The Workshop had interrogated Olivia about her own preconceptions beyond the putative fussiness of her prose, it would have worked as the bourgeois counterpart to Human Resources (1999) and Time Out (2001), two of the more trenchant studies of globalization and its discontents as it affected a shrinking native working class; or if Cantet and Campillo’s script had included the point of view of Malika or Yohan, the latter played with righteous intelligence by Axel Caillet.
Perhaps the white boy’s story is the only one Cantet can tell. The last sequence, with its intimations for Antoine of a life adrift — from family, his mild literary talents — in circumstances that allow him to chew on his resentments, looks in context like too neat a resolution; it’s the kind of trick I expect in a short story written for a creative writing class. The warm glow of Milon’s natural lighting scrubs any hint of menace). Still, as Europe and the United States struggle with convulsions made possible by two generations of bemused complacency, The Workshop is a more fruitful experience than another dispatch from West Virginia coal country.
GRADE: B
The Workshop is now showing at Tower Theater in Miami.
Humanizing The Vacuum 