The Screengrab : time out

Precursors: Time Out (2001)

Nick Schager — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Pulse director Kiyoshi Kurosawa returns to American theaters this weekend with Tokyo Sonata, another of his portraits of social loneliness and estrangement in which the head of a disintegrating nuclear family conceals unemployment from his relatives by pretending to head to the office every morning. It’s a ruse previously featured front-and-center in Laurent Cantet’s superlative Time Out, a similar study of existential detachment in which nondescript middle-aged businessman Vincent (Aurélien Recoing) loses his job and responds by fancifully concocting – and then telling his suspicious wife about – a nonexistent new one at the United Nations. Cantet presents corporate France as an impersonal hell made up of cool, reflective surfaces and Vincent’s actions as desperate attempts to achieve autonomy not available in his professional environment. His contentment with his make-believe life, evidenced by his turning down more than one real job offer, as well as his use of a cozy country cabin as his fake office, both speak to his increasingly comfortable retreat into fantasy. The more Vincent lies, however, the more obvious it becomes that even this counterfeit life of freedom requires, ironically, a considerable amount of work. As details about its protagonist’s situation come into clearer focus, Time Out’s thriller-esque affectations prove somewhat less riveting. Yet there’s no shortage of chills in the film’s unhurried, transfixing social-realist depiction of the anomie fostered by modern capitalism, of one man’s inability to separate his identity from his vocation, and of the untenable deceptions in which he eventually cocoons himself as a means of coping with shame and humiliation.

TIME OUT TRAILER

And, also, a trailer for Tokyo Sonata:

Screengrab Interview: Laurent Cantet Takes Us to School

Phil Nugent — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Laurent Cantet is one of the most daring and stimulating filmmakers to come out of Europe in the past decade, and he keeps challenging himself. Cantet's movies (Human Resources, Time Out, Heading South), contemporary social dramas that he casts with a mix of trained actors and nonprofessionals, explore issues and anxieties--about work, class, gender, aging--that most films shy away from, and they do it without seeming dry or messagey. His newest film, which will be released in America this weekend under the English language title The Class, is his most ambitious project to date. Based on the book Entre les murs ("Between the Walls") by François Bégaudeau, a 37-year-old former teacher turned novelist and essayist (and film critic), it's a high school movie like no other. Working from a script credited to himself, Bégaudeau, and his own regular screenwriting collaborator, Robin Campillo, Cantet gathered together a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to represent the multicultural classroom presided over by their teacher, played by Bégaudeau. He made some real finds, including the mouthy sparkplug Esméralda Ouertani and Franck Keita, who plays Souleymane, the angriest and most defiantly unreachable of the kids. Once everything was in place, they worked together for a year, with their scenes monitored by three high-definition cameras. (One cameraman focused on the teacher, the second on the kids, and the third was hired to keep an eye out for the happy accidents.) The result is a movie that's bristlingly alive and full of surprises--not the least of which are provided by Bégaudeau's instructor, a hotshot charmer who badly wants the kids to see him as a cool older dude rather than a stuffy instructional figure, and who isn't always able to maintain perspective when faced with a choice between meeting a troubled, needy kid halfway and preserving his own self-image and ego. The Class, which won the Palme d'or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, is arriving in theaters just in time to confirm its status as one of the best pictures of the year.

SCREENGRAB: So, directing your leading man in this movie, you got to tell a film critic what to do. That must have been fun.

LAURENT CANTET: When he was in front of the camera, he was not a critic anymore. He was very busy, not just because he was acting himself, but also guiding the scene from within the scene, guiding the children to go where we wanted them to go. He had to think of all that while we were filming.

SCREENGRAB: I think this is the first movie you've made that started with someone else's material. How did you get involved with Bégaudeau and his book?

CANTET: I wrote the first script two years before reading the book. It was the story of Souleymane. The book is more documentary than the film itself. The book is sort of a diary. Every day he wrote about what he was doing while he was teaching, and then he rewrote that to make it into a chronicle of the life of the class. There was no real dramatic structure in the book. That's why I was able to bring the story about Souleymane that I had written and connect it to the documentary material that Francois had proposed. Then I began to put the script together with Robin Capillo, and Francois would read it every day and tell us, "I can believe this" or "I don't believe that" or "I wouldn't say this in that way, here's how I would say it." He was really more of an advisor than a co-writer.

SCREENGRAB: One thing that I find exciting about your movies is that you seem to be really interested in exploring the ways that institutions let people down.

CANTET: I wanted to show all the complexities of this institution, the school. On the one side, it helps a lot of children to integrate into society. On the other hand, it excludes a lot of children, children like Souleymane, who can't find his place in the system. Or girls like Henriette, the one who says at the end that she feels she hasn't learned anything.

SCREENGRAB: I was a little surprised at the degree to which the teacher is presented as this flawed character. In some ways, his character really doesn't come off very well. Is that something that Bégaudeau was totally on board with?

CANTET: I didn't--we didn't--want to make an ideal teacher, a heroic teacher. Human beings just aren't like that. And of course, it was no problem for Francois to show that side. Because he was acting, you see. It was the same with the children. The boy who plays Souleymane is nothing like Souleymane, he's very kind. But he was able to show this image that's unlike himself.

SCREENGRAB: So the kids were able to step up as actors? Because I was curious about how much you had to shape the roles to fit who the kids already were.

CANTET: There was a kind of alchemy involved. We worked together for a year, you know, in our workshop that we built inside the school, and at times I couldn't tell what was coming from me, from Francois, from the children themselves. We worked together for three hours each week from October till May, and then we shot during the summer, for seven weeks. I wasn't paid [for the preparation period], nobody was paid. It's just my way of working.

SCREENGRAB: How did you find these kids?

CANTET: It was quite easy. We just found the school that was interested in the project, which happened to be in a very mixed neighborhood, and we organized this weekend, and told the volunteers that they would all be welcome, and we had fifty volunteers at the beginning, twenty-five of whom stayed to the end. I didn't choose them. They simply decided to be part of the film.

SCREENGRAB: Some of the kids who really stick out, like Esmeralda--did you know early on that you were going to be using them a lot?

CANTET: Yes, Esmeralda was at the first meeting, and after two minutes -- [laughs and shakes his head]--it was obvious that she was going to be playing a central role. And we were expecting to find such a character, we had a place for her in the conception. And some kids created their own character. Take, for instance, Wei Huang, the young Chinese boy. In the script, we had a young Chinese boy who doesn't speak French very well, and he's afraid of making mistakes, so he just doesn't speak. That might have made for an interesting character. Except then we met Wei, and Wei is very talkative. He likes to express himself, even though his French isn't perfect, he only arrived in the country two years ago. We weren't going to tell him, "Wei, shut up, be more like the character we've written," because Wei was more interesting than that character. So we rewrote the character to better fit Wei.

There's also a character who's a Goth. The boy himself is not a Goth in real life. But when we talked about costuming, someone asked, "Are we obliged to dress exactly as we do in real life?" I said no, if someone wants to be, say, a Goth... I didn't even get to finish my sentence. He was like, "Yes! Yes, I want to be a Goth!" So I said, let's try it. It gave him a chance to be, during the shooting, what he doesn't dare to be in real life. But he really embodied that character, he really lived with that character. He was able to improvise as that character.

SCREENGRAB: You like working with non-actors.

CANTET: Yes, it's something that is, first, very interesting, because you learn a lot of things, and the film becomes based on what they can bring from their own experience. I really like working with that, and I'm always surprised by what can happen. Accidents can happen, you really have to listen to what's happening and use it to rebuild the scene. It's something that I really like.

SCREENGRAB: How different is it working with non-professionals, compared to working with someone like Aurélien Recoing, whose performance in Time Out, which is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen, must have taken an awful lot of skill to bring off?

CANTET: In fact, with Aurélien Recoing, we worked a little bit the same way. Aurélien rehearsed with the non-professional actors in the cast, learning to work with them, to help them be at ease in the scene. I like to mix professional and non-professional actors in a scene because I think it helps both. The non-actors may be driven a bit by the professionals, who can give them the confidence they need to get through it. And the professionals don't act the same way as they do when they're working with another actor. They have to really listen.

SCREENGRAB: Have you gotten any feedback from the educational community about The Class?

CANTET: [Pause.] Yes.

SCREENGRAB: {Laughter] Oh-kay.

CANTET: In fact, the film divided the teachers in France, between those who liked it, because they could recognize the problems and issues that they have to deal with every day. And then there are others--and I should say, I think they're in the minority-- who rejected the film because they watched it as if it were a documentary film, and they were judging the teacher, and they didn't want to see a feature film like that. They didn't want to recognize themselves in that. But of course, the teacher is what I wanted him to be, and we never set out to make a film that would present this model to the world where we were going, "Oh, that's a good teacher," or pointing a finger and going, "That's a bad teacher!" We just wanted to show, that's a teacher.

Cannes 2008: Late-Breaking News!

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:19:00 GMT

One week ago today, the Cannes Film Festival powers that be unveiled this year's selection of films in Competition. But while there was plenty on that list to get excited about, it seems they weren't finished, as today they announced three more selections in the official Competition lineup.

True to form, one of the latecomers was a French entry, and it proved to be a pretty interesting choice: Entre les murs, the latest film by celebrated filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose previous works included the 2000 film Time Out. Another American film was added today as well- Two Lovers, the latest from We Own the Night's James Gray, a Cannes favorite. Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, is said to be a romance, making it something of a change of pace for Gray, who has to date specialized in crime stories.

But the big news today was the announcement of this year's opening-night film, Fernando Meirelles' Blindness. The film, which stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, will screen in competition, with its pedigree the hope is that it improves on the dicey precedent set by recent Cannes openers such as Fanfan la Tulipe and The Da Vinci Code.

Added out of competition was the opener of the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar, Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one). Finally, the closing film of the festival was officially announced as being Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?. Sadly, this star-studded film (the cast includes Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and Robin Wright Penn) is a Hollywood satire, not a big-screen adaptation of the long-forgotten sitcom Wha'Happened?. So all you Mike LaFontaine fans in the audience will be sorely disappointed.

But wait, there's more! Two more names were added to the Official Competition Jury (also announced last week), which brings the jury up to nine members. The additions were French actress Jeanne Balibar (who worked with fellow jury member Sergio Castellitto in Va Savoir)...

... and Iranian writer/director Marjane Satrapi, who directed last year's Jury Prize-winner Persepolis and collaborated with jury prez Sean Penn on the English-language version of the film.

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 14 through the 25th.

Movies We Missed: Les Revenants [They Came Back] (2004, Robin Campillo)

Paul Clark — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I know what you're thinking. You looked at the title of this piece, saw the French title and thought, "there goes Paul again, recommending another French movie. Who wants to bet that this one's existential and deliberately paced, and full of observations and death and social class?" And the thing is, you'd more or less be right. But Les Revenants has something most of those movies don't have:

Zombies. Do I have your attention now?

Why I missed it: Actually, most people missed this movie. After playing at numerous festivals during 2004 and 2005 (including Cannes, Venice and Toronto), it never received a proper theatrical release on our shores. Eventually, it was unceremoniously released on DVD, and I wasn't even aware of its existence until my friend Jason, an unapologetic zombie movie nut, recommended it to me. Well Jason, when you're right, you right. And this time, you were right.

Why I should have known: Les Revenants was Robin Campillo's first effort as a director, but his other work was familiar to me, having co-written and edited numerous films by the talented filmmaker Laurent Cantet. Of particular note is his work on Time Out, which wouldn't seem to be similar to Les Revenants but showed Campillo skilled at mining existential unease, a skill that would serve him well in his directorial debut.

Why I ended up kicking myself: While Les Revenants is a movie about zombies, it's like no zombie movie I've ever seen. Even the zombies themselves are different, neither the lumbering flesh-eaters of classic zombie fare nor the running snarling beasties of more modern genre incarnations. In many ways, it's difficult to tell the "returnees" (as the film calls them from the humans who never died. Even the film's opening shot of thousands of returnees walking out of a cemetery looks like it could just as easily be showing mourners departing a funeral. Aside from a body temperature difference of roughly five degrees and some slowness in their mental processes, the returnees walk and talk like any other human. They fit in fairly well in society, with many of them returning to the workforce.

One of the subtexts of the zombie-movie genre is the idea that the zombies were once our loved ones, and Campillo's film makes this idea explicit. Some of the most fascinating scenes in the film show the different ways in which the living deal with the return of their dearly departed. Some of them are overcome with emotion, such as the parents whose child has returned to them, but others are more conflicted, like Rachel, played by Géraldine Palihas. Rachel's husband Mathieu died several years previously in a car accident, and it's fairly clear she's had a hard time getting over his death. After Mathieu returns, Rachel ignores the fact as long as he can until he finds her and works his way back into her life.

However, it becomes clear that the returnees aren't the same people they once were. Those of working age are given jobs, but while Mathieu returns to his former engineering firm, he can't function at his former level and is put to work in a factory. The returnees' difficulties with communication make a number of people uneasy, and by and large they're treated as second-class citizens. In addition, the returnees are a restless bunch, wandering in the daytime and leaving their houses by night to attend mysterious meetings. What could they be planning?

Campillo sort of answers that question in the final third of the film, although the returnees plans and motivations aren't particularly clear (escape? Sabotage? Recruitment?). Much more fascinating is the way the film's relationships play out near the end. The parents of the returned child disagree on how to treat him- while the father dotes on his son, his wife is growing increasingly freaked out by his behavior. And Rachel, who had been reluctant to welcome Mathieu back into her life, becomes increasingly devoted to him, often to the detriment of her own well-being.

Despite the zombie storyline, Les Revenants is not a gorefest. There are no violent deaths in the film, much less the bloody disembowelments we've grown to expect from the genre. Campillo's film is subtler than that, depending more on the subtle existential dread that comes from finding that someone you love isn't quite the way he used to be. With Les Revenants, Campillo has announced himself as a filmmaker to watch.

Time Out's Time Travels

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Just like everyone else on the face of the planet, Time Out magazine is favoring us with their best-of-2007 movie roundups. (You can find their local film writers' best-of lists online, including New York, Chicago, and Dubai, among many others.) But in London, home of the original Time Out guide, their film staffers go above and beyond, giving us a snotty, sometimes silly, sometimes crude, but sporadically amusing look at what we can expect in the world of cinema come 2008. Among the predictions: "Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn will start their own clothing line called 'Tiresome Retreads'"; "Francis Ford Coppola will announce that he will only be releasing films piecemeal, and via a Honduran website"; and "Jack Black will star in at least one film per month throughout the year, except for June, when he will star in a new film every week."