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France Isn't Paris

By Peter Cowie | May 29, 2008 | France Isn't Paris

Peter Cowie interviews the director Laurent Cantet.

Laurent Cantet has established himself as one of France's most intriguing talents, directing pictures with a strong social undercurrent, and revealing a natural gift for directing actors. Last Sunday night he was awarded the Palme d'Or by Sean Penn's jury at the Cannes festival for his new film Entre Les Murs (The Class).

Born in 1961 in Melle, France, Cantet made his debut with two shorts: Tous à la manif (1994) and Jeux de plage (1995). His maiden feature, Human Resources (Ressources humaines, 1999) won the César for Best First Film, the same prize at the San Sebastian Festival and the EFA's European Discovery 2000. Time Out (L'emploi du temps) followed in 2001, winning an award at Venice, and in 2005 Cantet attracted widespread attention for Heading South (Vers le sud), which again earned prizes at the Biennale in Venice.

This edited interview with Cantet is by noted film historian Peter Cowie and is extracted from Projections 15: European Cinema (Faber and Faber, 2007), a special edition of Projections in association with the European Film Academy, co-edited by Cowie and Pascal Edelmann. Conducted in December 2006 the interview nonetheless ends with a discussion of Cantet's preparations for Entre Les Murs.

PETER COWIE: Your films are removed from everyday surroundings. Is that deliberate?

LAURENT CANTET: There are several reasons for that. First off, I'm from the provinces, although I've lived in Paris for twenty years. I come from a very rural area, Niort, between Poitiers and La Rochelle. It's important to de-centralise films, socially as well as geographically. Paris is not the centre of the world. The point of view of a Parisian is perhaps somewhat narrower than that of someone from outside. Besides, the cinema is often a very Parisian practice — it's easier to shoot in places you know well, even within the Paris area. I always like going off the beaten track. Surprise and misunderstanding are stimulating.

PC: In Time Out, a man loses his job and hides away in the countryside. How did that film originate?

LC: At the outset, it was my memories of an affair that we'd followed closely in France, the story of Jean-Claude Romand who wasn't working and convinced everyone that he was working because of course he needed the social status that a job brings with it. I didn't do any research into the man's character nor his story, leaving out all the sordid details, the murders of his family, the way his secret had been uncovered and so on. Instead I just built a character around him himself. Like Romand, Vincent is not an ordinary unemployed guy; he is a man who chooses not to work and tries to invent his life as though he was writing a script. Even if he is trapped in his story, he finds it really exciting and that is something a lot of spectators refuse to see in the film. What interested me was to see a man of this kind alone in a landscape.

We shot a lot of it in the Alps, in Grenoble and the surrounding area, and then on the motorways and a little in Switzerland, in Geneva.

PC: In Human Resources, one has a strong sense of location. Was the film shot in a real factory?

LC: It was indeed shot in real surroundings while the factory continued to function normally. It was at Gaillon in the Eure area of Normandy, the part closest to Paris. I was interested in evoking the atmosphere of my youth, at a time when I had pals who were somewhat confronted with this problem vis-à-vis their parents, and then also because Paris is not really a workers' city. It's a milieu that would be difficult to identify in Paris. Then of course in showing that this young man coming from the capital has a kind of Parisian status among his friends, and vis-à-vis his parents; he's no longer part of the same world because he's been to Paris. In French, the expression, "monter à Paris" has a kind of status, and also something fatalistic.

PC: A little like Claude Goretta's film, La provincial, on the same theme?

LC: Yes. In France it's something very powerful because it's a very centralised country and everything is supposed to happen in Paris. Most of my high-school friends now live in Paris.

PC: It's one of the rare films since 2000 to address the contemporary political situation with the 35-hour week and so on.

LC: I really like topical issues. The reality of our world is so complex that it's worth studying very carefully, and we often leave that task just to journalists. But our view of current affairs is always spontaneous, there's little distance between the journalists and the topics they're addressing. There's something unrefined in their analysis.

PC: Where would you place yourself in the current French cinema? Is there a tradition in France that's different to that in other countries?

LC: The great privilege that we enjoyed, and still enjoy — although to my mind it's the thing most under threat — is the French tradition of making marginal films, and we need that to continue.

It's less easy now than it was during the 1990's to raise money. It's true that there's a concentration on financing big projects that the financiers know will recover their budget at the end of the day. But I have the impression that we're moving towards a two-speed cinema: on the one hand very expensive movies and on the other, very cheap ones that are made more and more quickly, in economic conditions so tight that it's only the goodwill of all concerned in the production that makes them possible at all. And between these two extremes there's a middle layer in which my films lie, and of course they are more and more difficult to set up because they involve an initial investment and they are by no means sure of recovering their outlay.

PC: Do you feel that there's a gulf between the big American studios and the European films that struggle for a share of the market?

LC: Where the situation seems to me to be the most dangerous is in the exhibition sector. The fact is that some French films are released with 1,000 prints, and the smaller films with 10 prints have neither the room nor the time to exist. The gap is growing between movies that do well at the box-office, and films that I like, films like my own in fact, that don't do so well because they need time to develop an audience. People don't rush to see them in the first week, because they are not 'must-see' movies. You don't have the option when a film stays in the cinemas for just one week.

PC: How would you compare European films to those from elsewhere?

LC: The distinction is not necessarily a geographical one in my opinion. I find myself more absorbed by certain American or Asian films than I am by a French film. I feel closer to Edward Yang or Abbas Kiarostami than to Luc Besson, for example.

PC: And your next project?

LC: I'm working on a film that somewhat resembles Human Resources. It'll be made in much the same way, exclusively with non-professional actors, and it will take place in a junior high-school, among kids of fourteen to fifteen years of age — a 'difficult' school, with all kinds of different communities and social classes in Paris rubbing side by side.

The links between apprenticeship, work, and language will form the real gist of the film. I'm going to improvise a lot with the pupils. I know them already because I've been working with them since September [2006] in a kind of makeshift studio in a high-school. I'd like to capture the fragments of life, and the reflections of each youngster on the essential issues that France and perhaps countries beyond France have to confront today.

It's also adapted from a book written by François Bégaudeau, published last year. He's both a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma and a teacher of French in a junior high-school in Paris, and his book charts a year in the life of his class. So we are building the film around this concept, even if it will not be so much an adaptation as an extension of the book. It's called Between the Walls (Entre les murs). We'll shoot this coming July and August, for release in early 2008.