Few directors in today’s cinema are so committed to their work, to their time and, in a hurry, to themselves. “All the revolutions in the world began in France and they ended in Cuba,” Laurent Cantet commented on one occasion on the occasion of the presentation of Return to Ithacahis particular raw and disillusioned reading of the wound of the Cuban exile from the text of Leonardo Padura The novel of my life. The film arrived in her filmography in 2015 and, in some way, it was her way of settling scores with the idea of utopia, always so present in her cinema and always on the run.
On Thursday he died at the age of 63, pursued by cancer, according to the French newspaper. Delivery. Behind him he leaves a filmography trapped and committed to the point of exhaustion with the time that surrounded him, Cantet spent his entire life arguing with the world, with his world, with our world. In Human Resources (1999), one of his first and most relevant films, attempted to reason about the impositions, whims and punishments of work. Immediately afterwards, I insisted on the same matter with The use of time (2001) to, immediately afterwards, offer one of the first and most lucid and cruel views of the tourism that we consume and that consumes us in To the south (2005).
And so on until reaching major works of contemporary cinema such as Class (2008), for which he received the Palme d’Or. So, what worried him was what happened to education. So, in general. For him, making films, always with the camera glued to the breathing of his protagonists, was basically an exercise in debate, discussion, fighting against himself, it has already been said, against each of the utopias that shape us and, why not, condemn us.
Class It’s not just any movie. It’s not even quite a movie. Built in collaboration with the screenwriters Franois Bgaudeau and Robin Campillo, the whole thing bursts into the viewer’s gaze like a miracle. It is not so much a film, we said, as a shred of skin torn from life itself. Between reality and fiction, Cantet reached the highest part of a cinema with a proposal that made the border of the screen disappear. The director and his collaborators shot at the same time, writing and rewriting over and over again a script continually enriched by the contributions of the students. They were the actors engaged in the meticulous construction of their own lives in front of the camera. It was the last film presented in the Cannes competition and, suddenly, there was no doubt that it was the first of them all.
What you see is a piece not only of France, nor of its youth, nor of its failures nor of its achievements. What you see is simply the best possible portrait of the same time, of our time. Rarely has a film been able to get so close and so clearly to both reality and the exercise of cinema itself in the process of discovering it and discovering itself, of constructing it and constructing itself, of giving it meaning and giving meaning to itself. It is cinema that is created in front of the eye at the very moment of appearing.
From then on, Cantet continued doing his thing, which, don’t doubt it, was always our thing. Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Band’(2012) was his most convoluted and perhaps confusing attempt to appropriate an alien world. Insist on adolescence as in her masterpiece, but from a novel by Joyce Carol Oates set in New York. The attempt had something of a challenge and even a refutation of all his previous cinema. It wasn’t exactly flawed, but it was deeply anomalous. Which is not necessarily bad.
His subsequent works were, in their own way, a return to the same. After his sad trip to the sad Havana above, the director returned to his obsession with portraying the sensation of life from not so much the position closest to it as the one closest to the ground, the dirtiest if you will. In The writing workshop(2017), the camera breathes with its characters and bleeds with them. This time it is simply about sneaking into something as unusual, as forced if you will, as a writing workshop. There, a veteran writer and a group of unemployed young people rehearse writing a thriller for starters. It’s summer. It’s hot. And it is precisely there, in the suffocating sensation of proximity, where The tape grows until it sticks to the skin of each of the protagonists. Through their bodies you can see the drama of a definitively broken society. Intelligent, voracious, meticulous and, most obviously, muddy. As dirty as the floor usually is, it becomes the only point of view from which to observe and feel life. Those.
And so on until reaching Arthur Rambo, his latest work presented at the San Sebastin Festival. It told of the rise and subsequent fall of an immediately successful writer (played with ease by Rabah Nait Oufella) who, suddenly, is faced with the wild and very despicable tweets that he wrote some time ago under the nice pseudonym of the title in honor, in a two-way way, to the savage poet of the 19th century and the no less contumacious soldier of fortune of the 20th. The film shines not so much for its originality when it comes to facing the questions it raises (what if identity in social networks, what if provocation, what if the limits of fun, what if the sense of irony, what yes the irony of meaning, yes the cancellation, yes yes, yes no) like, and this is what is relevant, the agility, certainty and transparency with which it faces the world we walk in.
Cantet manages to illustrate as rarely before each of the contradictions that hide behind the apparent innocence of a mobile screen. What matters is not so much the conclusion or the answers provided as the film’s ability to grapple with reality, get confused with it and, finally, stain the viewer’s retinas. Count the fever, count the fetid breath of each of the doubts, count the real. The camera moves between the bodies with the same lightness as it does between the tiny screens full of emoticons and nonsense until it expands the limit of, indeed, what is real. The real, we have arrived, is only the unreal.
On Thursday Cantet died and the feeling of a truncated career remains. Cinema has produced few directors who are so kind, so dedicated, so generous and so lovable. How many realities were left to create, how many lives to rebuild, few utopias to exorcise.