• Tori and Lokita

7/21/23 (Fri)

The latest offering by the Dardenne brothers focuses as usual on the tribulations of immigrants in a Belgium town. The pre-adolescent Tori and slightly older Lokita have been smuggled into the country from Africa, but only Tori has been able to get the proper papers to stay. They’re not siblings (the boy is noticeably darker than the girl) or even from the same country (Cameroon and Benin, respectively), but they have become close during their journey and hope to lie their way into visas by claiming to be family.

The film is extremely dark; the kids don’t have a hope, nor do we. They do whatever they have to in order scrape out a living, including drug running via pizza boxes, while waiting for the visa that will allow Lokita to be a home helper. Lokita does her best to memorize information to convince authorities that she is Tori’s brother, but her efforts have thus far been unsuccessful. The employer then throws Lokita a lifeline: he promises to secure her papers if she will work for three months at a secret drug cultivation facility, to which she agrees. Upon arrival, however, she discovers that she is not allowed a phone or any contact with the outside world for the entire period, leaving her utterly alone and worried sick over Tori. When the equally concerned Tori manages to sneak out and find her, their situation begins to unravel. The ending comes quickly, unexpectedly and definitively.

Unusually for Dardenne films, there is no possibility of redemption here in light of the brutal ending, though I suppose Tori has some future if we imagine hard enough. They endure poor or at best indifferent treatment from everyone: their drug-dealing employer, his clients, the smuggler (who pressures them to pay back the money for bringing them there), immigration authorities, the police, and so forth. The saddest scene is when a helpless and humiliated Lokita is forced by the Algerian cook to take her clothes off for a small sum, knowing that her little brother is hiding under the bed watching it all.

One charming scene features the kids at the bar in a rare happy moment singing a song they learned from their time in Italy, presumably their first landing on the illegal boat from Africa. The number, “Alla fiera dell’est” (At the Eastern Fair), is a popular Italian children’s song dating from 1976 that is based on none other than the 16th-century Passover staple “Chad Gadya” (The Only Kid). In the Italian version, animals are eaten by larger creatures in succession, until finally the bull is killed by the butcher, who is then taken away by the Angel of Death. That angel is ultimately overpowered by God. The kids never sing the song to the end, suggesting that God never comes for them in this dog-eat-cat world. (Of course, it could also have to do with the length of the song…) Tori’s later rendition at the funeral was moving.

The film is told entirely from the viewpoint of the kids, but as usual lacks the perspective of the host nation. The kids were smuggled into the country in the first place, leaving society unprepared to deal with them along with the many thousands of other illegal migrants. The film appears disapproving of the government worker who treats Lokita bureaucratically, but given that Lokita is in fact lying, the worker’s suspicion seems justified. In another case, Lokita, limping on the road from an injury, manages to get a woman to stop her car and agree to take her to the hospital. However, when Lokita talks about a small companion hiding in the bushes who she’d like to bring along, the suspicious woman quickly drives away. Some reviewers have slammed the driver for being insensitive, but her concern seems pretty reasonable to me.

The acting was superb throughout, including extraordinarily natural performances by the kids, who are not professional actors. Some long scenes were filmed impressively in a single take. The film is technically beyond reproach.

Still, I would have appreciated a better balance. It’s hard to know how much the lack of empathy or outright evil of nearly all the characters in the film truly reflects Belgian society. I almost wondered if the film was meant conversely to discourage illegal immigration given what the kids go through. Still, the relentless gloom is a bit much. The movie is well made with a nice documentary feel, but even a hint at a better future would have been welcome.