Laurent Cantet, the award-winning film-maker whose creations tackled some of the most complex issues of modern French society, including meritocracy, the education system, diversity and class struggle, has died aged 63 after an illness.
Cantet was best known outside France for his film Entre les Murs (The Class), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 2008. It depicted life inside the classroom of a secondary school in Paris’s diverse 20th arrondissement and the relationship between students – compellingly improvised by non-professional teenagers – and their at times exasperated teacher.
Based on an autobiographical novel about an idealistic young teacher taking on a troubled class of underprivileged kids, Cantet cast the book’s writer in the lead role.
It became one of just a handful of Palme d’Or-winning films to sell more than 1m tickets at the French box office in the past two decades.
“Serious, subtle, incisive, disturbing, funny and poignant”, wrote Le Monde of the film, which won its prize at Cannes with a unanimous decision by the jury that was led by the American actor Sean Penn. The Class unpicked the subtle intellectual standoffs and conversations that take place behind a closed classroom door: failures and frustrations not just between teachers and pupils but also between a rigid education system and an unequal modern society’s view of young people.
The film was praised by the then president Nicolas Sarkozy, who said it depicted the difficulty of the French education system as well as the valiant efforts of teachers.
But Cantet, who was described by the Libération critic Didier Péron as a social film-maker in the vein of Ken Loach, told Le Croix that he turned down an invitation to meet the rightwing Sarkozy at the Elysée after the film came out. “I didn’t want to go and be photographed with Sarkozy, and I didn’t want to talk about diversity with someone who had invented the ministry of national identity,” he said.
Cantet was hailed by French critics for bringing a form of generosity and humanism to the topics he tackled, which ranged from brutal management systems and status in the world of work, shown in his film Human Resources, to 1970s sex tourism in Haiti in Heading South.
The Cannes festival described him as “a fierce humanist, who sought light despite social violence and found hope despite the harshness of reality”.
His other films included Time Out, inspired by the real-life story of a man who killed his parents, wife and children after pretending to be a successful doctor for two decades. It won two prizes at the 2001 Venice film festival.
Cantet returned to Cannes in 2017 with The Workshop, about a group of troubled young people attending a writing workshop near the southern city of Marseille. His last work, Arthur Rambo, released in 2021, explored how a reputation could be destroyed on social media.
Cantet had been working on a new film, The Apprentice, which had been set for release next year.
