Laurent Cantet always understood that cinema had a limit, and that limit was the human being. Today, Thursday, with his death at the age of 63 in Paris, we have lost a director who, above and beyond his films, beyond his narrative drive, defended the people, and tried—and almost always achieved with enormous success—that people were the center of their work. Compared to other dictator creators of the style, Cantet always defined himself as a narrator and observer, not as a manipulative director, although in this way he created a coherent, wonderful filmography, which, among other awards, led him to win the Palme d'Or with Class in 2008, a film with which he became an Oscar candidate.
His constant fight against cancer did not prevent him from filming some memorable films. His last work, Arthur Rambo (2021), was a good example of knowing how to take the pulse of reality and reflecting environments a priori Away from him, a boy raised in Melle, a city in the west of France, the son of two teachers who had a decisive influence on his humanism. Arthur Rambo is the pseudonym of Karim, a twenty-something of North African origin raised in a banlieue who triumphs in the elitist Parisian literary environment, and who just when he touches fame sees how in hours his career is cut short due to his history on Twitter, due to some messages that his nom de guerre already indicated as ironic. “I am aware of the importance of social networks for militants who organize movements, who exchange ideas, but I have the impression that on Twitter one expresses themselves in any way: you have to react very quickly, you do not reflect before writing. I think that this tendency to think in slogans is part of contemporary culture. And that simplification of thought scares me,” he explained at its premiere. There was Cantet, as the newspaper titled Liberation his obituary, “between sweetness and rebellion.”
Cantet studied photography at the University of Marseille, and later cinema at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris, where he graduated in 1986. In his classes he coincided with Dominik Moll and Robin Campillo, with whom he wrote on several occasions and whom he encouraged to direct. 120 beats per minute. Just with Campillo I had written the script for his next project, Enzowhich had already closed its cast and planned to shoot at the end of 2024, starring a teenager who, fleeing from a controlling father, becomes a bricklayer.
After collaborating on several documentaries and directing several shorts, the Arte network invited him to develop a project and thus he debuted in the medium-length film in 1999 with Les Sanguinaires. He combined it with what would be his spectacular feature debut, Human Resources (1999), a drama focused on the clash between a boy who begins to work in the human resources department of a factory and his father, a veteran worker in that company. It was a forceful, angry presentation, born from his beliefs, “perhaps because I come from a family of militants,” although far from political parties: “My soul does not work with that commitment.” It won at the San Sebastián festival in the New Directors section and won two César awards, the Oscars of French cinema.
a real case
His second full-length, The use of time (2001), was inspired by the real case of Jean-Claude Romand, who tricked his family and friends into believing he worked in Geneva at the World Health Organization. After decades of living asking them for money to invest in Switzerland, he ended up murdering his wife and his children. This same drama was recounted by Emmanuel Carrère in The adversary. Cantet focused it again on labor relations, on the crushing of human beings by professional machinery: “I'm not interested in whether evil exists. What interests me is trying to understand people's mechanisms and to achieve this I fight not to enter into moral judgments. As Renoir says, everyone has their reasons. And it is those reasons that I want to study. Maybe it's too materialistic of me, I don't know.”
In need of a different air, but driven by his social battle, Cantet's third feature traveled outside of France, to Haiti, to illustrate sexual tourism in that country with To the south (2005), which starred Charlotte Rampling, and which was developed in the late seventies to enhance those pleasure trips of middle-aged women in the middle of the fierce dictatorship, founded on misery, of Baby Doc Duvalier.
His fourth film established him, because beyond being a masterpiece, Class won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2008, when French cinema had not obtained that recognition for two decades. Curiously, Cannes never liked Cantet much. In Class, He played with mixing reality and fiction by adapting a biographical book by François Bégaudeau, a teacher at a Paris school, who appeared on screen, accompanied by a cast made up of non-professionals, teachers and students playing themselves. Cantet created a workshop with the students before selecting those who would form the final team and filming, with four cameras, what happened between them and his teacher, Bégaudeau. “I looked for moments of tension within the classroom and to see how they were resolved. Enough of taking teenagers for idiots, they are much smarter than I was at their age. The teacher's aggressiveness is a way of recognizing that students deserve to be treated as equals. Provoking them allows them to think. Although I would not say that it is aggressiveness that applies to them but rather irony and truth,” he insisted at its premiere.
A lover of anchovies and Padrón peppers, vacationing on several occasions in Cádiz, Cantet understood Spanish, and that helped him so much in his participation in the collective film Seven days in Havana (2011) as in Return to Ithaca (2014), co-written with Leonardo Padura, a story that showed that the current Ulysses do not have to be happy when they set foot on the promised land again, because the film's protagonist, Amadeo (Jorge Perugorría), returned to his hometown after 16 years in exile in Spain. In that collapsed Cuba, echo of a nation that probably only existed in the imagination of its leaders, the Ithaca of the friendship between Amadeo and the colleagues he left behind emerges in the middle of the Ithaca of the revolution (in a reflection of the verses of Cavafy). Between his filming in Cuba, Cantet adapted a novel by Joyce Carol Oates in foxfire (2012), the story of a girl band in upstate New York in the 1950s, and which was his least accomplished work.
He mixed all of these films with his social militancy, his work in support of immigrants, especially illegal workers called in France the sans-papiers, and that is why he was part of the group Collectif des cinéastes pour les sans-papiers. And to talk about that France that was bustling beyond the creaking parquet floors of the bourgeoisie of the big cities, he returned to the working method of Class in The writing workshop (2017), in which some teenagers from La Ciotat, a town with a rich industrial past and turned into a hell without a future, struggle to find their way out of life through a literary workshop taught by a teacher who has recently arrived in the city. So that the young actors could use their inner voice, the filmmaker worked with them weeks before and finished the script with his collaboration. There was another of Cantet's talents, his ability to give voice, his defense so that all kinds of opinions can be expressed that help the viewer understand a situation. Both in The writing workshop like in Arthur Rambo There are dual characters who “along with enormous humanism harbor great anger,” an anger about which he warned: “It is time for us to take it into account, it is going to explode in our faces.”
In the last minutes of Class, A student tells the teacher after the course: “I haven't learned anything. “I don't understand what we do.” With Laurent Cantet, we learned about cinema and life.
All the culture that goes with you awaits you here.
Subscribe
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT
#Frenchman #Laurent #Cantet #winner #Cannes #Palme #d39Or #great #humanist #filmmakers #dies