‘The Worst Ones’ Review: Capturing the Reality of an Underserved Suburb in Northern France Through the Eyes of Child Non-Actors
Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
With their debut feature, The Worst Ones, director duo Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret explore the ethics of contemporary social realist filmmaking through their intense concentration on the child perspectives of a housing project in a suburb of Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. Combining their backgrounds in movie casting with ideas from their 2016 short Chasse Royale, Akoka and Gueret turned to open castings for children around Northern France to find the personalities they were drawn to, reverse engineering the narrative of The Worst Ones to build a film around their young muses. Centered on a fictional movie production that chooses a working-class Cité Picasso housing project for inspiration, The Worst Ones questions the moral lines between exploiting and honoring the socio-economical struggles of a real-life community and the children who face hardship growing up in such a place.
The Worst Ones begins with audition tapes for a first-time filmmaker's movie, Pissing in the Northern Wind. Appropriated from a northern french proverb, the film's title intriguingly communicates with how the director will ultimately manipulate the residents and spaces of the neighborhood in which he is shooting. Expecting to capture the true spirit of the community through the eyes of adolescents, the director chooses to cast non-actors from local schools. The tapes are for the child actors who will eventually become the stars of the film - Ryan, Lily, Maylis, and Jessy. - completely different personalities who have all been raised in the neighborhood. With their unique energies and difficult upbringings, the four youths cross metatextual boundaries to also become the complex protagonists at the center of The Worst Ones.
Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
The child stars at the core of The Worst Ones bring the movie to life, creating a compelling experience that will pluck audiences' heartstrings. Completely distinct characters work together to create a snapshot of Boulogne-sur-Mer and its neglected community. Ryan - the film's true core - cannot be older than ten. With an absent father and a mother in and out of psychiatric care, Ryan lives with his loving older sister and deals with abandonment issues and expressing his emotions. These troubles manifest in outbursts of extreme anger, which the director of the work being made exploits to get the reactions he wants for filming. Another of the leading quartet is Lily, a sixteen-year-old girl living alone with her single mother shortly after the death of her younger brother. Lily is a natural in front of the camera and finds purpose in the opportunity to be part of Pissing in the Northern Wind. Confident and endearing from the outside, Lily deals with the hidden pain of mourning and feels ostracized by the other girls her age in the neighborhood. Arguably the most intriguing (and unfortunately overlooked) of The Worst One's characters is Maylis, a queer-coded girl entering teenagehood who is like a wallflower, silently observing and absorbing her surroundings. With little camera time compared to others, the figure of Maylis delivers one of the film's most contemporary and engaging outlooks. Ultimately, Maylis becomes the one who takes the most issue with Pissing in the Northern Wind and chooses to walk away from the production. The Worst Ones impressively excavates these central protagonists and their histories, characters that have experienced much beyond their years. Here is where the director's experience in casting and working with children can flourish; they chose to stick with a structured script and little improvisation to let the main actors embody their individual energies without the self-consciousness that can be brought on via a looser, more ambiguous screenplay, especially when working with non-actors. Notably, The Worst Ones was also shot in near-chronological order to assist the performances even more with upholding the emotional arc of the movie's narrative.
From the exterior, The Worst Ones has structural elements reminiscent of other social realism works concerned with the juvenile viewpoint, like The Florida Project or Ratcatcher - two excellent movies that work in a totally different register than The Worst Ones, which refreshingly reframes expectations of the genre to create a film that holds audiences conscious of the moral ambiguities involved with blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, especially when dealing with child characters. The juxtaposition between the ulterior motives of the film-within-the-film's production and its street-casted performers creates an uncomfortable tension that further asks the viewer to exhume the purposes of making social realist works at the expense of real lives and communities. Akoka and Gueret seem captivated with uncovering cinema's unclear fixations with "poverty porn," even though their work on The Worst Ones cannot answer such a complicated question that has plagued the history of film since its conception, practically. Instead, this movie serves authentic gestures to its working-class subjects, functioning with honesty to portray the tribulations suffered by its central characters and honoring their personal stories without fetishizing them. Through this act, The Worst Ones nourishes a certain level of visibility to its young non-actors and the profound experiences of their lives.
Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
The craft of The Worst Ones works overtime to distinguish itself from the typical trappings of social realist filmmaking. The movie diverges from melancholy, austere portrayals of a lower-class neighborhood to create a visual language filled with sunshine and color, deeply saturated to show a certain beauty and texture to the people of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Cinematographer Éric Dumont shoots most of the film in closeup shots that accentuate the faces and emotions of the film's stars, employing hand-held cameras at face level to reflect the authenticity of its characters. Instead of relying on a dramatic score to stress the emotional impact of The Worst Ones, the filmmakers utilize a soundtrack made up of primarily contemporary rap - a genre that would realistically be playing in the headphones of the neighborhood's youths. As a result, the French rapper Rémy becomes a leitmotif of the film, with his passionate music largely mirroring the challenging experiences of the neighborhood’s residents, particularly that of Ryan, who shows great admiration when talking about and listening to Rémy's music.
Humorous, intellectual, and sometimes challenging, The Worst Ones serves as an ambitious debut feature for Akoka and Gueret, even if there are moments of its metatextual arrangement that become convoluted at times by the hazy partitions it makes between embodying and criticizing notions of social realist cinema. Nevertheless, the film's most remarkable achievements are showcased through the powerful performances the directors extract from their fascinating non-actors. Initially making its world premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Prize in the Un Certain Regard Section, The Worst Ones went on to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall and was acquired for North American distribution by Kino Lorber. Beginning Friday, March 24, The Worst Ones will be released theatrically in New York City at The Quad and on Friday, March 31, in Los Angeles, followed by an expansion to other cities.