“A ferocious humanist who sought light despite social violence”, the Cannes management defined him in a statement
Goodbye to Laurent Cantet. The French director, winner of the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 2008 with The Class is dead. I had 63 years old. “A ferocious humanist who sought light despite social violence”, the Cannes management defined him in a statement. And Cantet surprised everyone in 2008 with that half-documentary, half-fiction film, presented to the press on the last day, apparently an earthenware vase among iron vases (Sorrentino with Il divo, Garrone with Gomorra, Two lovers by James Gray and Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman, among others). The class with a budget of not even two million euros featured a French teacher, François Bégaudeau (author of the novel of the same name which inspired the film) and a group of real students from a Paris school aged 13 to 15, from different geographical and economic origins, unbalanced between power and opportunity. The class leaves just qthat sense of painful ethical suspension, of pedagogy animated by good intentions that perhaps did not work in all respects, of equal, secular and republican cultural teaching, very “French-style”.
Like a style, that of Cantet, himself the son of teachers, never too much declaimed, animated by a naturalistic and sensitive gaze, always on the verge of a possible social short circuit, which we had already learned to see in Human Resources (1999) and Full Time (2001) where he addresses the distortions of neoliberalism by expressing them in a familiar and intimate way: the son of the province who makes a career as a white collar worker and back in town he finds himself having to fire his father; the father of a family who, when fired, pretends to his wife and children for years that he has a prestigious job. Or with Towards the South (2003), the story of an elderly French lady (Charlotte Rampling) who engages in sexual tourism by exploiting young Haitian offspring.
But that’s itor it is precisely with The Class that Cantet reaches a sort of expressive and political pinnacle, exposing with rigorous and naked clarity the complexity and imbalances of a fragmenting social system, using the theme of public school, resulting in a sort of animated inaction. Afterwards, probably driven by more impressive projects, certainly due to the popularity of the Palme d’Or, Cantet raises the bar, pardon the look, telling with Foxfire (2012) the story set in none other than the state of New York of five young girls who form a gang to fight machismo and the control of men over women. Cantet’s always so compact and punctual compositional streak falls apart a littlemore functional, more classic heroisms and nostalgia emerge, probably not exactly comparable to their deeper and more poetic chords as in Ritorno a L’Avana and L’atelier.
The last flicker, which almost seems like a scratch of anger, was the best Arthur Rambo (2020) where a young Algerian star of engagé literature on migrants discovers himself with a homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic past in disguise on a well-known blog. Here too, a perceptive short circuit between what society wants, demands, promotes and the swings, the imbalances between individual narcissism and starting material conditions, between the deception of appearances and the realistic effort of good intentions.
