‘The Workshop’ Plunges Into a Class Divided in the South of France

Feelings run deep and menacing in “The Workshop,” an intimate and timely film from French director Laurent Cantet, about a group of young adults enrolled in a summer writing class in the south of France. Only this isn’t the lavender-scented idyll of Provence or the gleaming luxury of the Riviera; the setting is La Ciotat, a port town that has gone from its midcentury glory days of building ships to its current slot in the global economy, servicing yachts. The students are a diverse bunch of working-class locals; the teacher, Olivia, is a famous novelist, brought in from elsewhere to help them write a book together that has to take place in the town.

The class differences between teacher and students are so pronounced that they threaten to plunge the film into a schoolhouse drama — that well-worn genre in which a charismatic authority figure, inevitably likable yet inevitably tough, gains her students’ grudging respect and eventual trust. (Cantet also directed “The Class,” a moving yet unsentimental film about a teacher and his young charges in one of Paris’ poorer arrondissements.)

But Marina Foïs’ performance as Olivia pulls off a delicate balancing act. Even as Olivia emerges as a complicated character — an accomplished novelist with sympathy for her students as well as a surprisingly perverse imagination — she never quite sheds her remote cosmopolitan sheen.

Olivia’s good intentions keep running aground with Antoine, the workshop’s gadfly and troll, played with taut intensity by Matthieu Lucci, in a bracing debut. While the other students propose a thriller based on La Ciotat’s proud shipbuilding past, Antoine repeatedly goads them with his casual racism and violent fantasies.

We see a lot of Antoine — in class, at home, goofing around with his friends, swimming in the cove — but the smart, canny screenplay by Cantet and Robin Campillo takes care not to make him more explicable to us than he is to himself. In the workshop, Antoine gives a resolute performance as a disaffected young man; in the rest of his life, he seems to be drifting. More than caustic anger, he emanates uncertainty and confusion.

Antoine watches online clips by a far-right propagandist who rages against globalization and “EU bureaucrats,” but his interest verges on desultory; the clips are just another thing to look at after he does a few situps or inspects his physique in the mirror. More enthralling for him are video games, which he plays with what looks to be genuine engagement and actual joy.

Pierre Milon’s lush cinematography captures the warmth of the Mediterranean light, but it’s the first shot of the film — footage from a video game of a knight-errant, wandering a mountainous landscape in search of what to do next — that sets us up for the contemporary fable that’s in store.

At one point, Olivia tries to mine Antoine’s experiences to help her understand a character that she’s having a hard time writing about in her own book. It’s a measure of this film’s stealthy brilliance that it blurs the line between empathy and exploitation. The real story, it turns out, won’t be hers to tell.

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