Laurent Cantet, who died today of illness at the age of 63, was an intelligent, high-minded progressive filmmaker whose literate, emotionally committed, well-acted movies addressed (and criticized) French society at all levels.
His most famous film was The Class (“Entre les murs”), which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Fest in 2008, about an idealistic young teacher reaches out to a diverse class of underprivileged kids.
It was based on an autobiographical novel by a former teacher, François Bégaudeau. Cantet cast Bégaudeau himself as the teacher, who rendered a performance matching the nonprofessional teens playing his diverse class of pupils.
The richly detailed film implies, among many things, that all teachers must be to some extent actors who are playing a role in front of the most difficult audience imaginable–young, rebellious pupils of ethnic and racial minorities.
Cantet took the idea of the inspirational schoolteacher and gave it a new force, as the teacher is finally forced to debate sexual politics with the pupils outside in the schoolyard.
With the lucidity of his direction and the urgency and integrity of the performances, this was a gripping film, winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the first French winner since Maurice Pialat’s Under the Sun of Satan in 1987.
Cantet’s follow-up film, Time Out, looked again at white-collar leaders of France’s financial and service industries.
Cantet cast that great and underused French actor Aurélien Recoing as his dreary antihero, Vincent.
He is a middle-management salaryman who is made redundant but, too ashamed to tell his wife, he goes off to “work” every day in his suit, hanging around office lobbies all day where he pretends to know people; he becomes a ghost in the soulless machine of work and then drifts into improvising a criminal scheme.
It is based on a true-crime case, also fictionalized in film by Nicole Garcia in 2002 as The Adversary, although Cantet’s version was better and subtler. Vincent is a person who can really see how empty a work-based life is and how fallacious it is to need work to fill the hours.
Cantet challenged bourgeois sensibilities of left and right in Heading South in 2005, in which Charlotte Rampling plays a sensualist who buys sex in Haiti from young black men and is contemptuous of those timid romantics and self-pitying men and women who forbid pleasures to themselves and others.
Cantet found his inspiration in the workplace and the reality of people’s working lives.
Other features include his English-language girl-gang movie Foxfire in 2012, from Joyce Carol Oates, or his Cuban reunion drama Return to Ithaca (2014), about four old leftist comrades meeting again in Havana, and sheepishly coming to terms with an outmoded ideology.
But in Human Resources, Time Out and The Class, Cantet made brilliant films about contemporary ordinary life.
