At this year's Cannes Film Festival, a gang of two brilliant brothers returned to the foyer of international media attention with yet another film. At its competition premiere, The Dardenne Brothers were applauded and briefly booed for their latest neo-realist effort. Their film entitled ‘Tori and Lokita‘ was met with generally positive appraisal; with the exception of a few harsh critics who adamantly disliked the film for its exploitative and questionably micro-aggressive narrative. The festival community was met with an internal discussion; a conversation involving craft, responsibility, and the ethics of performance art when child-actors are involved in the picture. The Dardenne Brothers have a notorious reputation for working with young new-comer talent, often commissioning children from their film's distinct communities of interest.
Around the same time, on the other side of the Palais, another film was premiering during the festival stint. In the Un Certain Regard competition, a film entitled ‘The Worst Ones' aptly took the world stage with an intriguing critical view on the humanitarian ethics and susceptibility of adolescent youth within film-oriented productions. The Worst Ones, reminiscent of the questionable performativity of The Dardenne's latest oeuvre, features a fictional Belgian filmmaker at its core. Even the casting of the film's blonde Timéo Mahaut oddly resembles the lead of The Dardenne's ‘The Kid with a Bike'. The parallels don't seem coincidental; a direct cinematic investigation into an international issue which borders between the lines of filmmaking and rigorous code of conduct.
Set within the Picasso Project located in the North of France, The Worst Ones opens its tale of complicity with a sequence of raw, uninterrupted interviews. We witness each non-professional child-performer involved with the fictional project converse with the respective production team; a film-crew hellbent on producing a reprehensible drama revolving around teenage pregnancy and other forms of poverty porn. At one point during the sequence, a child acknowledges themselves as one of the titular ‘Worst Ones'; a self-inflicted comment indicating their impoverishment to the artists behind the camera. Their gaze is strong, their bruises on a pixelated display. Directorial duo Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret command the young performers through keen naturalism; slang and restless posture amplifying the fringes of cringe which radiate from their casting conversations.
From the get-go, there's an arduous anthropological message stated. From the location scouting process which directly fetishes the civilians of the Picasso Project, Akoka & Gueret distinctly keep their drama at a neo-realist scale. There aren't any explosive revelations nor intense sequences of non-stop verbal battery. The Worst One relishes within extended sequences of the shooting process; repetitive line recitations and conversations with crew which add to the effectiveness of its central thesis. The production grows, where even greater questions revolving around the intimate shooting of a youth-oriented sex scene causes concern regarding the director's intentions. The locals refute the perpetuated narrative of the fictional film; perceptions of the state slowly inciting discontent.
The film, akin to the start, ends on an inconclusive note. The questions asked, the statements procured, are ultimately up to the interpretation of the viewer. The Worst Ones is occasionally frustrating, yet consistently insightful — a cautionary tale on the stigmatisation of image. Yet what's particularly questionable about the film is its own production history. Notably, the behind-the-scenes production of The Worst Ones is left unscathed and out of the picture. Whilst riddled with an intricate anecdotal structure, the on-screen depictions raise some concern. Within its social commentary, there's another frame of vision created for cinematic investigation. The potentially hypocritical cycle repeats itself, where the film's lack of urgency, further diminishes the moral clarity of its initial provocations.
With a film such as The Worst Ones, distinction between process and product cannot be separated. As a love letter to filmmaking, Akoka & Gueret have produced a formidable directorial debut. As a work of social commentary, the film's production is left with more questions about its own internal tribulations in contrast with the fictional film-shoot at play; an endless paradox forever unanswered.
