Bad Seeds (2018)

Kheiron's Bad Seeds arrives from 2018 bearing the mild, agreeable scent of a French crowd-pleaser, which is to say it wants to be loved and mostly succeeds on charm rather than argument. A petty swindler named Waël, played by the director himself, is conscripted into mentoring six expelled teenagers in a Paris banlieue, and the ensemble assembled around him is notably, deliberately polyglot: Arab, North African, and Romany faces fill nearly every principal role, with a Lebanese refugee at the center. This is representation by composition, not by announcement. Nobody turns to the camera to explain it. The film simply assumes that the outskirts of Paris look like the outskirts of Paris.

Where it grows heavier is in the sermon. The screenplay distributes wisdom in small, tidy parcels, and the New York Times observed that the message arrives one corny aphorism at a time. Waël pretends to have invented things and coined sayings; the children eventually present him a book of quotations to prove they knew all along. Redemption, mentorship, second chances: the machinery is visible and the gears turn slowly. Nadia is the sharpest and most assertive of the group, and Shana's disclosure of abuse is handled with a measure of agency, though the film orbits Waël's rehabilitation and not any thesis about women. The flashbacks to Lebanon, where Christian, Jewish, and Muslim soldiers take turns at massacre, treat sectarian horror as reciprocal tragedy. That is humanism, old and unfashionable, not a racial-justice brief.

What the film declines to do is instructive. It has no interest in climate, in body politics, in neurodivergence, in queer life, or in any structural indictment of capital, beyond a €10 bribe and a few counterfeit bills. Jimmy's illiteracy is a matter of schooling and language, not diagnosis. The result is a modest, warm, faintly preachy fable that believes in individuals repairing themselves. We have seen this film many times. It remains watchable, and it remains exactly what it is.