Synopsis
The Workshop (L'Atelier, 2017) is a French drama from Laurent Cantet you can watch online on iFILM. In sun-bleached La Ciotat on the southern coast, a handful of teenagers join a summer writing course to build a crime novel together, guided by Olivia, a well-known novelist.
The story they invent keeps pulling them back to the town's shut-down shipyard, idle for twenty-five years. Antoine (Matthieu Lucci) feels nothing for that nostalgia. What grips him is the anger of right now — violence on the news, dread about where the world is headed. He needles the group, picks fights, and squares off against Olivia herself. Played by Marina Foïs, she is rattled by his aggression yet quietly drawn to it.
Cantet, who took the Palme d'Or for The Class, again casts non-professionals and lets scenes breathe through improvisation. A discussion about fiction slowly becomes an autopsy of where young rage comes from. Low-key and tense, with no big plot turns, it rewards viewers who like dread that builds out of plain conversation. Stream The Workshop (2017) online on iFILM.
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