Laurent Cantet's 'The Classroom' was an outstanding film, semi-improvised with non-actors, about the difficulties faced by a teacher working with disaffected kids. He's back on not disimilar territory with 'The Workshop'. A creative writing class is arranged for a group of unemployed youth in a beautiful but deindustrialised region of France. Here, the setup and the interactions between teacher and class are slightly more forced; but the dialogue is once again compelling, and it's stitched together in a nice story where one of the students, an intelligent but undereducated young man, learns (almost despite himself) to express his alienation in words. Cantet is great at extracting strong performances from his mostly non-professional cast; in spite of the contrivance, I found it compelling.
Review of The Workshop
