He belonged to this prolific generation which had resuscitated French auteur cinema starting in the 1990s. Appearing later than his peers – Eric Rochant (A world without pity1989), Patricia Mazuy (Cowhides1989), Xavier Beauvois (North1991), Cédric Kahn (Rail bar1991), Arnaud Desplechin (The Sentinel1992) or Pascale Ferran (Little arrangements with the dead, 1994) – Laurent Cantet leaves us much earlier than them. The filmmaker, Palme d’or 2008 with Between the walls, died Thursday April 25, after a long fight against illness which eventually won, at the age of 63.
Born in 1961 in Deux-Sèvres, this son of a teacher joined Idhec (the ancestor of Femis) in 1984, where he became friends in particular with Dominik Moll and Gilles Marchand. He will always retain from his social origins a humanism and a moral attitude which do not run the streets of show business. Transmission, reflection, the intelligence of things, all things which are the spearhead of the school, were also cinematographic virtues for him. In the wake of the Dardenne brothers, inventors of this great contemporary form, he found, late but without leaving it, his artistic style in a subtle mixture between social concern and romantic issue. All at the demonstrationhis first short film made in 1994, in some ways announced the program.
Two highlights have marked his career, with nine feature films made between 2000 and 2021. This is his first feature, Human ressources (2000), as well asBetween the walls (2008), which earned him a Palme d’Or which had not been awarded to a French film since the arm of honor granted to the whistlers of Under Satan’s sun by Maurice Pialat in 1987.
The first of these films, which reveals a remarkable 23-year-old actor in the person of Jalil Lespert, is a sort of Oedipus in the factory. Franck, a business school student, returns to his native region and joins for an internship the human resources department of the factory where his professional father and his sister have worked for thirty years. A conflict lasting thirty-five hours soon transforms him into a tragic hero, however in a much more surprising way than the situation seems to announce. Perfectly documented, shot with a majority of non-professionals, Human ressources will mark the spirits by making the business world, an area still little frequented by fiction cinema, a romantic theater like any other.
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