Right from the start, Lise Akoka’s and Romane Gueret’s fiction feature about an indie film crew making a fiction feature about disadvantaged kids in a suburban French town seems to be skewering the methodology of the Dardenne brothers. The director of the film-within-the-film, a bearded gentleman named Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh), is almost immediately identified as being Belgian, though he tends to get more specific later in the movie by calling himself Flemish. There’s also an early scene that feels lifted wholesale from the Dardennes’ The Kid With a Bike. If this is parody it might have worked if the film-within-the-film were better, but it’s stuffed with cliches about the poor and, unlike with the Dardennes, Gabriel’s poetic tendencies dominate his approach to the material. In that sense, The Worst Ones—the title is an observation by one of the kid actors about how the filmmakers are only auditioning children with miserable backgrounds—should more accurately be described as a farce about the hypocrisy surrounding liberal good intentions, but its humor is curdled by a sour attitude toward all the participants, including the youngsters who are nominally being exploited for art and commerce.

The best thing about the movie is the interactions between the young actors and their response to being in the spotlight. The youngest, Ryan (Timéo Mahaut), has the most complicated relationships. A towheaded troublemaker whose ADHD is like an open wound, Ryan lives with his well-meaning and responsible older sister because social workers have decided his mother’s mental health problems make her unfit to be a guardian, though she insists she can cope. Ryan thus has a certain native understanding of his character, a boy like him being raised by a drug-addicted grandmother, but can’t command the self-possession necessary to take Gabriel’s direction, which is not only too specific for Ryan to comprehend but clueless in its determination to wring “realism” out of someone who is ignorant of artifice. In one scene Gabriel flies into a rage because Ryan keeps smiling at tormentors who are about the beat the shit out of him, which seems like a much more realistic reaction to the scenario than what Gabriel wants. Silmilarly, teenage Lily (Mallory Wanecque), already branded as the high school slut, is cast as a pregnant 15-year-old with trauma to spare, a role she internalizes easily because she’s still mourning the death of her little brother from cancer. In the simulated sex scene between Lily and Jessy (Loïc Pech), it is Lily—still a virgin, despite her image—who makes the most of her homemade method acting, while Jessy, a juvie sexual blowhard in real life, explodes in a homophobic fit of frustration at the AD because he can’t transcend his self-consciousness. Lily sees her makeshift professionalism as placing her above her sneering peers’ immaturity. She’s determined to see this acting gig through to a career, but she lacks the life experience necessary to leave the job on the set and ends up developing a serious crush on the older sound technician, following a path of misread signals to a broken heart. Lily’s opposite number is Maylis (Melina Vanderplancke), a freckle-faced, sexually fluid adolescent who quits halfway through the production because she has caught on that the whole thing is a scam, a decision that immediately makes her the most interesting character in the movie, but she doesn’t appear again. What a waste.

It wasn’t until after I watched the movie that I learned all the kid actors were themselves amateurs, and thus wished I could read French in order to sample local reviews to see if anyone accused Akoka and Gueret of the kind of exploitation they were implying Gabriel was guilty of. That, of course, is a value judgement, but despite a few missteps I think the Dardennes on the whole make good, important movies about subjects that deserve more attention. By the same token, The Worst Ones also deserves attention. I just wish it were more deserving of appreciation. 

In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114). 

The Worst Ones home page in Japanese

photo (c) Eric Dumont – Les Films Velvet