The scene is set one Summer in La Ciotat, a town near Marseille which used to be prosperous thanks to its huge dockyard but has been in decline since its closing 25 years before. It is in this context of quiet desperation that a writing workshop has been set up to help a group of seven young people integrate into the world of work. Under the guidance of well-known novelist Olivia Dejazet, the participants are asked to write a noir fiction connected with the industrial past of their hometown. Session after session, one of them, a boy named Antoine, stands out. Provocative and aggressive, he gets noticed by his systematic opposition to all, including Olivia. Even more alarming, the story he has devised and that he reads aloud, the cold description of a mass murder seen through the eyes of its perpetrator, proves very disturbing. Antoine understands the killer too well. At this point, Olivia starts experiencing a feeling of attraction repulsion to Antoine.
21 January 1970, Boulogne-Billancourt, Hauts-de-Seine, France
May 18, 2018
An intelligent film, voracious and meticulous. [Full Review in Spanish]March 23, 2018
The film keeps you guessing, not only as to where the story's going but what kind of film it will turn out to be.March 22, 2018
A thoughtful reflection on the sociopolitical narratives (and myths) of contemporary, crisis-ridden France.April 10, 2018
"The Workshop" never lets us know exactly what anyone really thinks. These tantalizing clues only add to the film's allure.March 22, 2018
An intimate and timely film ...April 26, 2018
The Workshop would like us to feel like we watched something meaningful about a lot of different things, when in fact it tabled all the elements of meaning, set some of them rolling, but didn't follow through.April 17, 2018
The Workshop is still, and then jumps... to what Laurent Cantet is more interested in: how it confronts and articulates society, particularly the French. [Full review in Spanish]May 08, 2018
The value of the film is that it speaks of so many things without ever losing the flow of the story or complicating the collective motives... [Full Review in Spanish]May 14, 2018
[Director] Laurent Cantet escapes from the social theme of his laureate The Class to get into the terrain of suspense, although The Workshop is still just as effective... [Full review in Spanish]April 11, 2018
[The Workshop] deserves to be evaluated as the sum of its parts... [Full Review in Spanish]April 05, 2018
The leads are excellent...anchoring Cantet's sincere, complex mixture of discourse and voyeurism, as if the undiluted teacher/student naturalism of his 2008 film "The Class" had fermented into something more volatile.March 20, 2018
Cantet remains a gifted filmmaker ... but this isn't the return to form that his fans have awaited over the past decade.