Laurent Cantet’s The Workshop boasts a concept that in another picture might result in a piece of twisty, intellectualized metafiction: a semi-successful novelist, Olivia (Marina Foïs), teaches a writing workshop to a multi-racial group of young students in La Ciotat, a small town just south of Marseille. She encourages the students to explore the concept of genre — to conceive of a murder mystery — and to also connect to the working-class history of the place itself. One student, a young white teenager named Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), seems both engaged and roiled by the assignment; his cooly disturbing writings sit […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 24, 2018