Marina Foïs and Matthieu Lucci, left, in The Workshop (Strand Releasing)

Pity the port town of La Ciotat. Once a jewel in the crown of southern France, the formerly bustling shipbuilding stronghold now lies idle and impoverished by globalization. One of the town’s young inhabitants, Antoine (Matthieu Lucci), feeds on YouTube videos recalling the shipyard’s past glories. He also watches clips of a National Front–style demagogue exhorting crowds to reclaim France’s lost greatness. Alongside listless classmates, the teenager takes a fiction course from a Parisian novelist, Olivia (Marina Foïs), whom he regards as snooty and superior. Lumpenproletarian challenges elitist, and she coolly fires back. How will their standoff play out?

Laurent Cantet’s The Workshop initially came to New York as part of Rendezvous with French Cinema, and its unhappy trajectory matches the festival’s generally foul mood. The film touches on many contemporary social discontents while building tension around the fraught rapport between the touchy Antoine and the tight-lipped teacher. Their relationship hardly gets off to a good start, with the instructor trying gamely to draw her apathetic students out of a funk. When Antoine starts tweaking his classmates, defying the prof and sneering at her efforts, we know we’re in for a confrontation.

The pair’s blunt exchanges benefit from a very French rigor where educated elders expect intellectual effort from callow youth; there’s no To Sir, with Love turnaround here, where a benevolent teacher rescues nihilistic young people. The worldly Olivia responds to her student’s provocations with sharp questions. Soon pupil and teacher are spying on each other on social media; before long they stalk each other in person.

Similarly the film’s focus zeroes in on Antoine, following him through a melancholy family life and interactions with children that show him capable of a repressed tenderness. Online videos featuring Antoine, and viewed by Olivia, reveal a darker side of the young man. These two head for a tense tête-à-tête where we cannot be sure who is using whom and where we find out just how dangerous Antoine really is.

The script brings up more issues —immigration, Muslim-Christian suspicions, class antagonism, and terrorism—than it can comfortably handle, and foreshadowed violence does not pay off as expected. But in its grim, enervated portrayal of frustration and miscommunication, The Workshop is less than satisfying cinema but more like life, where people talk past each other without understanding.