Falling on Deaf Ears, Again: Hervé Le Roux’s Reprise (1997)

Abstract

During the last decade French cinema has been renewing itself with a form of social cinema unseen since the period of May 68. Whereas the working class and the workplace had almost completely disappeared from filmic representation in the 1980s, eclipsed by an intimist cinema focused on the psychological malaise of a new generation, workers made a strong return on French screens in the late 1990s¹ with fiction filmmakers such as Jean-François Richet, Bruno Dumont, the Dardenne brothers, Robert Guédiguian, Érick Zonca, Dominique Cabrera and Laurent Cantet (to name but the most well-known directors), as well as documentarians such as Claire Simon, Alain Guiraudie, Marcel Trillat, Michel Carré, Christian Rouaud and Hervé Le Roux, whose 1997 film, Reprise, will be discussed here.²