The Workshop

(France, drama, 113 minutes, unrated). In a small town in southern France, a few young people in a summer writing workshop collaborate on a crime thriller with the help of Olivia, a famous novelist. The creative process will recall the town’s industrial past, a form of nostalgia to which one student, Antoine, feels indifferent. He clashes with the group and Olivia, who seems at the same time alarmed and captivated by him. “Marina Foïs’s performance as Olivia pulls off a delicate balancing act. Even as Olivia emerges as a complicated character — an accomplished novelist with sympathy for her students as well as a surprisingly perverse imagination — she never quite sheds her remote cosmopolitan sheen. Olivia’s good intentions keep running aground with Antoine, played with taut intensity by Matthieu Lucci, in a bracing debut.”–New York Times