Laurent Cantet, humanist filmmaker who subtly wove social points and romantic stakes

He belonged to the prolific technology that resuscitated French auteur cinema from the Nineteen Nineties onward. Rising later than his friends – Eric Rochant (Un Monde sans Pitié (Love with out Pity), 1989), Patricia Mazuy (Peaux de Vaches (Thick Skinned), 1989), Xavier Beauvois (Nord, 1991), Cédric Kahn (Bar des Rails (Railway Bar), 1991), Arnaud Desplechin (La Sentinelle (The Sentinel), 1992) and Pascale Ferran (Petits Preparations avec les Morts (Coming to Phrases with The Useless), 1994) – Laurent Cantet left us a lot sooner than them. The filmmaker, who gained the 2008 Palme d’Or with Entre les Murs (The Class), died on Thursday, April 25, on the age of 63, after an extended battle with an sickness.

Born in 1961 in Melle, western France, the son of a schoolteacher entered IDHEC (the forerunner of the FEMIS movie and tv college) in 1984, the place he made pals with Dominik Moll and Gilles Marchand. He at all times retained a type of humanism and an ethical stance from his modest upbringing that aren’t commonplace in present enterprise. Transmission, reflection and intelligence – all ideas that spearhead the college – have been additionally cinematic virtues for him. Following within the footsteps of the Dardenne brothers, inventors of this nice modern type, he belatedly however steadfastly discovered his creative fashion in a delicate mix of social points and romantic stakes. In a method, Tous à la Manif (“Everybody to The Protest”), his first brief movie from 1994, foreshadowed what would turn out to be his lingering disposition.

His profession, which incorporates 9 characteristic movies between 2000 and 2021, was marked by two main achievements. These have been his first characteristic, Ressources Humaines (Human Assets, 2000), and Entre les Murs (The Class, 2008), which gained him a Palme d’Or. The celebrated prize had not been granted to a French movie for the reason that rebuttal to the critics that was the awarding of Maurice Pialat’s Sous le Soleil de Devil (Below The Solar of Devil) in 1987.

The primary of those movies, which options the outstanding actor Jalil Lespert at 23 years previous, is a type of Oedipus story set in a manufacturing facility. Franck, a enterprise college scholar, returns to his native area and joins the human sources division of the manufacturing facility the place his working-class father and sister have been employed for 30 years. A dispute over the 35-hour week quickly turns him right into a tragic hero, albeit in a much more stunning method than the state of affairs would appear to recommend. Completely documented and shot with a majority of non-professionals, Ressources Humaines left its mark by turning the company world, a realm then seldom frequented by fiction cinema, right into a stage for novelistic theater like some other.

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