l’atelier (w&d laurent cantet, w robin campillo)

L’Atelier has a brilliant premise. A small group of mixed race teenagers from the Mediterranean town of Le Ciotat come together one summer for a writing workshop, helmed by the Parisian author, Olivia Dejazet, (Marina Foïs). The kids are supposed to create a thriller. They debate different ideas, touching on violence, history, race. One of them, Antoine (Matthieu Lucci) presents work which feels ultra violent. He provokes conflict with the second generation kids, from Algeria and sub-Saharan Africa. He’s a troublemaker, but he fascinates Olivia, who starts to investigate and discovers Antoine’s links to the far right. This set-up is highly effective, but the meta-drama between Olivia and Antoine starts to feel as though it pulls focus from the other kids’ story (and the fictional story they are creating). Their stories get lost, and the device, which seems ideal to explore the shape of French history over the course of the post-war period, feels as though it is sacrificed in order to explore Antoine’s neo-romantic radicalisation. It’s great to discover a film with the ambition and the wit to take on the issues L’Atelier does, but the resolution and enlace didn’t feel as though they quite lived up to these ambitions. 

l’emploi du temps (w&d laurent cantet, w. robin campillo)

Cantet, who died earlier this year was, for a while, one of the most feted directors on the planet. Looking at his IMDB page, it looks as though things might have started to go awry when he directed Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, in 2012, adapted from a Joyce Carol Oates novel. Up to then his cerebral, measured movies were big festival hitters. L'emploi du temps, a title I suspect is a pun, although my French isn’t quite good enough to confirm this, is a slow burn drama which looks at corporate life and the capitalist world. Vincent, a dreamy misfit, lies to everyone about his career. Unemployed, he constructs a narrative about another job working for a development agency in Geneva, where he theoretically helps small African start-ups. In reality he’s fleecing his former acquaintances by falsely promising to invest their savings in emerging Eastern European markets, as well as getting caught up in a smuggling business. Vincent thereby positions himself at the most dubious edges of the capitalist Ponzi scheme, which helps him maintain his wife and family in their comfortable bourgeois lifestyle. All of his is slightly thematic, and the narrative perhaps sags under the weight of the film’s ambitions, but L'emploi du temps nevertheless represents an attempt to puncture the creeping materialist comfort of affluent Europe, a companion piece to Hanecke’s more radical Seventh Continent.