The Kids Are All Write - Laurent Cantet's The Workshop

Summer in the town of La Ciotat near Marseille. A region once prosperous due to the presence of a large dockyard and commercial port, the area has been in steady decline since the closure of the port twenty-five years earlier.

A group of unemployed teenagers taking part in a state-funded writing workshop seize upon the town’s industrial past, working class heritage and history of communist labour strikes as ingredients to throw into the pot as they attempt to cook up a crime novel together, under the auspices of novelist Olivia (Marina Foïs).

Co-written by director Laurent Cantet and 120 BPM’s Robin Campillo, The Workshop is primarily interested in the most provocative and combative member of the group, Antoine (Matthieu Lucci). Observing Antoine’s spiky interactions with the rest of the group, it’s hard not to view him as not so much a fully-formed character, but a cypher for one of the film’s many Big Themes. He represents the inchoate disgruntlement of the intelligent, understimulated, disaffected, isolated young man - fertile ground for insidious ideas to take root. He lives a substantial part of his life online, providing him with his unmoderated yet narrow and self-selecting window onto the world.

The opening shot of the film is from the videogame The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Antoine’s avatar repeatedly shoots arrows into the air. He’s probably just getting used to shooting things...

We also watch him trawling YouTube and soaking up the rambling incendiary far-right rhetoric that he later parrots to the group. More than once, he invokes both the coordinated 2015 Bataclan terror attacks, and the cargo truck that drove through a crowd in Nice during the 2016 Bastille Day celebrations.

Far too often, The Workshop is saying a lot, but to what end? It muses about race and class and violence as entertainment. It ponders forms of expression, both in word and deed. It flirts with the power dynamic that exists between Antoine and Olivia - the palpable tension of attraction and repulsion between them. And therein lies the great frustration of The Workshop. It raises loads of interesting questions, but never seems especially interested in landing on any answers. Arguably, that's not the job of stories though, right? But that just leads to an even bigger problem - there isn’t a whole lot of story here. It’s a bunch of Very Topical Talking Points in search of a compelling narrative, and so it ends up being an unsatisfying, vaguely inert and overly didactic experience, which only served to remind me of these words:

"The moment you start preaching in a film, the moment you want to teach your audience, you're making a bad film." -- Douglas Sirk

The Workshop is in cinemas and on demand in the UK from Friday 16th November 2018