Laurent Cantet’s The Class, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, took the pulse of a working-class Parisian neighbourhood through the device of education. His latest film, The Workshop, employs the same approach: antsy teenagers bicker their way through a summer-school creative writing class with a successful novelist. In the process, they learn about themselves and their town, La Ciotat, a former industrial port in the south of France. But for one boy, Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), an outsider with a needling, combative manner that irks his fellow students, the process drives him further along the route of violent, far-right extremism with which he is already flirting. The film works best when it captures the flow of ideas and jostling debate – a documentary-style camera flits around the table, following the bouncing conversation. A third act that stumbles into genre territory loses focus temporarily, but is redeemed by a scene that celebrates the power of words above all else.
