Thriller that should have gone for broke
Dir Laurent Cantet Starring Marina Foïs, Matthieu Lucci, Warda Rammach, Mamadou Doumbia, Florian Beaujean, Issam Talbi
In their best-known film together, 2008’s The Class, director Laurent Cantet and screenwriter Robin Campillo put us in the thick of a complicated classroom fray.
Their new film The Workshop gives a twist to the format. It’s about a summer creative writing group in a French harbour town where a novelist called Olivia (Marina Foïs) is paid to impart writing tips. It’s clear some of the kids among the ethnically diverse and increasingly fractious gathering are there under sufferance. But there’s a general agreement that they should be collaborating on some kind of thriller: it will start with a murder, or at least a corpse. But whose? And what kind of story will this wind up being?
It’s not long before the group’s racial make-up charges the atmosphere. This is all largely down to Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), a white, disgruntled video-game addict who keeps wanting to remove politics from the equation. “We all know what that means,” says his main adversary Malika (Warda Rammach), a justice-seeking Muslim whose own coursework aims to reflect the town’s defunct industrial past, and to give the crime a potentially racial motive.
The film’s intellectual content, as you’d expect from this team, is sturdy. Much is teased out about how all creativity almost helplessly reveals the latent ideologies of the mind behind it. As a thriller, which it tentatively becomes, the film amounts to a work in progress, like the course itself. There’s some frustration in watching these tensions simmer away without being switched to the front burner. Cantet and Campillo, with their carefully weighted characterisation, their love of probing discussion and casual discord, have neither the inclination nor the chutzpah to go for broke.
It’s also a pity that the wider ensemble have less and less to do as the film goes on. As storytelling, it’s just not quite a filling meal, for all the feints made towards a heart-of-darkness journey into French far-right thinking. Even so, there’s a great deal to chew on, and while it’s possible to fantasise a truly explosive, riskily disturbing version of The Workshop, that simply wouldn’t be what its makers intended.