Laurent
Cantet, who has died of cancer aged 63, was a French writer-director who
brought a subtly probing, non-judgemental gaze to a run of films that doubled
as parables of contemporary life, most notably the Palme d’Or-winning The Class (2008). “I’m always interested in showing the complexity of our
world,” Cantet said. “What’s always difficult is making a film that deals with
reality without being too didactic.”
Consequence
was central not just to Cantet’s narratives, but also within the wider
filmography, each project seemingly containing the seeds of future work. Where Human
Resources (1999) stalked a business-school graduate sent to oversee layoffs
at the factory employing his aging father, Time Out (2001) followed a man
so ashamed at losing his job that he drives around during office hours,
pretending to be gainfully employed. “This movie,” wrote The New Yorker’s
David Denby, “makes one grateful that a serious European art cinema still
exists.”
Time
Out paired
Cantet with screenwriter Robin Campillo, himself later a director of note. The
pair reteamed for Heading South (2005), an adaptation of Dany Laferrière’s
short stories about white women visiting Haiti in the 1980s. Despite a typically
steely Charlotte Rampling performance, the film yielded scattered critical
responses, yet Cantet and Campillo rebounded with The Class, at once a
modern classic, strikingly different from the sentimental school dramas of yore.
For
starters, its source was a memoir by the essayist François Bégaudeau about the disillusion
he felt while teaching. Cantet asked the boyish Bégaudeau to play a version of
himself opposite real-life pupils in a dramatisation of the incidents that
pushed him to quit. In his Time review, Richard Schickel noted this
hard-won authenticity: “It is hard to think of another film more tightly
autobiographical than this one. It’s even harder to think of other films that
build so gripping a narrative out of a string of comparatively minor and
disparate incidents.”
Cantet
sensed he was onto something when teachers at the Parisian school he was
filming at complained pupils were more motivated about attending his fictional
lessons than their own real ones; a last-minute entry at Cannes, the film
eventually scooped the festival’s top prize, becoming the first French winner
for 21 years.
Although
beaten to the Foreign Film Oscar by the Japanese drama Departures (2008),
The Class proved a notable arthouse success, a film that asked big
questions about education without losing sight of what makes a compelling story.
“Fiction is really important in my films, even if it deals with something very
real and very social,” Cantet told one interviewer. “I think that putting
political and social issues first would make people afraid to come and watch
the film.”
This
particular fiction reflected the director’s roots. Laurent Cantet was the son
of two teachers, born April 11, 1961 in the commune of Melle in western France.
He studied photography at university in Marseille before attending the national
film school IDHEC.
Initially
Cantet ventured into non-fiction, assisting the veteran documentarist Marcel
Ophuls on Veillées d'armes (1994), on the siege of Sarajevo. Yet he
broke through with striking short and medium-length fictions: Jeux de plage
(1995), a coastal blueprint for Human Resources that won the Prix Jean
Vigo for Best Short Film, and the made-for-TV Les sanguinaires (1999),
about a man retreating to an island off Ajaccio to avoid the mania of Y2K.
Following
his Cannes triumph, Cantet was tempted westwards. In Canada, he filmed Foxfire:
Confessions of a Girl Gang (2012), an appreciably textured and detailed
adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel. He then headed south to Cuba for the
portmanteau 7 Days in Havana (2012) and Return to Ithaca (2014),
a characteristically intelligent if somewhat underpowered drama about old
friends reuniting on a rooftop terrace to discuss their place in revolutionary
history.
Thereafter
Cantet came home, reteaming with Campillo for the Marseille-set The Workshop
(2017), which updated the cross-generational debate that so elevated and
electrified The Class with the added dramatic charge of online
nationalism. That aspect of Web-enabled chaos was central to Cantet’s final
film, Arthur Rambo (2021, unreleased here), in which an emergent media
personality has his upward mobility checked by the discovery of hateful Tweets
posted by his younger self.
His
social commitment extended offscreen: he was affiliated with the Collectif des
Cinéastes Pour les Sans-Papiers, who provide support to undocumented migrant
workers, and he served as the president of Passeurs d’Images, an association
which campaigns for greater film literacy in schools.
Promoting
The Workshop, Cantet spoke of the need for society to engage the young: “I
was very happy at the end of shooting, [as] one of the guys [in the
non-professional cast] thanked me for the wonderful experience he had. He told
me, “You know, it’s the first time I’m speaking that much. Not just joking with
friends — I know how to do that — but with the film, for a few months, we had
to think precisely [about] what we are living today, and it was a great
experience.” I think that’s what we should do with young people: give them
space to think together.”
Laurent
Cantet, born April 11, 1961, died April 25, 2024.
