The Worst Ones Review: A Metatextual High-Wire Act About the Making of a Film

The Worst Ones sets out to create a thin line between critique and replication.

The Worst Ones
Photo: Kino Lorber

The ethics of representation is the subject of Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret’s The Worst Ones, a film-within-a-film redux of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s 1961 documentary Chronicle of a Summer that considers both how filmmakers work with underage non-professional actors and if a line can be drawn that distinguishes art from exploitation.

As the film opens, Gabriel (Johan Heldenbergh) sits off screen, asking his teenaged interview subjects, one after the other, about their day-to-day lives. He’s directing a project this coming summer, and he’s looking, as one teen comments, for “the worst ones,” or those with hardships of varying sorts. That term, which becomes a double entendre implicating filmmakers who exploit impoverished or unknowing subjects, points to the strengths and weaknesses of The Worst Ones, which struggles to clarify its aims even as it raises a number of incisive questions about realism in recent films such as those by Larry Clark or the Dardenne brothers.

The Worst Ones would be well served by a more specific target of ridicule or condemnation. Gabriel is making a film that involves teenagers fist-fighting with one another and having sex, but to what ends? Though he’s neither explicitly conniving nor naïve, Gabriel is seemingly committed to working with young actors in pursuit of art. Whether he’s after truth in the vein of cinema vérité or a docu-fiction rawness that he’s molding from just beyond the frame is a question that, had it been answered, might have zeroed in on a more specific target than the broader implications of a generalized male filmmaker with borderline questionable tactics.

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At the same time, since Gabriel isn’t a one-to-one correlate for a filmmaker like, say, Abdellatif Kechiche, who’s been accused of forcing his actors into vulnerable positions on the sets of Blue Is the Warmest Color and the Mektoub, My Love diptych, Akoka and Gueret steer the film away from being either a simple hit piece or a #MeToo rallying cry. They’re ultimately less concerned with gender than filmmaking as a practice. After all, they’re never more than one layer removed from what’s transpiring on screen given that they’re putting The Worst Ones’s young actors through a similar ordeal as Gabriel in the making of his own film.

Part of what makes The Worst Ones tick with a pace close to that of a thriller is its self-reflexive relationship to genre and knack for referentiality. After the inaugural interviews and title card, the film cuts to Ryan (Timéo Mahaut) racing home on his bike. That he looks like the protagonist of the Dardennes’ The Kid with a Bike is possibly intentional. Akoka and Gueret not only litter their film with allusions to various works of cinematic realism from the past 20 or so years, but they also shoot the film in a handheld style common to many of those works.

The Worst Ones sets out to create a thin line between critique and replication, and in depicting a filmmaker at work by using the same stylistic tools preferred by that filmmaker, each of its scenes thrum with anticipation for what it might reveal. Though the film isn’t outwardly funny, its cheeky play with form and its knowing winks to other films serves as one of its primary pleasures, especially as it remains unclear, even at the end, exactly what Gabriel is up to.

As structured, The Worst Ones simultaneously charts the lives of the teenage characters at its center, the making of a film, the mystery of its director’s intentions and possible behaviors, and the meta level of Akoka and Gueret’s own directorial aims. It’s a high-wire act that the film never quite pays off because all the pieces don’t come together in a revelatory way. Nevertheless, as a film primarily of questions, suggestions, and possibilities rather than answers, the ending is less a fault than a finger on the pulse of its own uncertain moment.

Score: 
 Cast: Johan Heldenbergh, Mallory Wanecque, Timéo Mahaut, Mélina Vanderplancke, Matthias Jacquin  Director: Lise Akoka, Romane Gueret  Screenwriter: Lise Akoka, Romane Gueret, Elénore Gurrey  Distributor: Kino Lorber  Running Time: 99 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2022  Buy: Video

Clayton Dillard

Clayton Dillard is a lecturer in cinema at San Francisco State University.

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