Monthly Archives: August 2023

  • Tori and Lokita

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2022)

    The Dardenne brothers’ films have repeatedly featured very young leads – from The Promise (1996) and Rosetta (1999), through The Kid with a Bike (2011), to Young Ahmed (2019) and now Tori and Lokita.  Even when children haven’t been the main characters on screen, they’ve more than once been crucial presences or absences.  The protagonist of The Son (2002) is a father in mourning, driven to take revenge on the man who killed the title character.  In The Child (2005), a petty crook and new father sells his infant to a black-market adoption ring then has second thoughts.  In five of the seven films mentioned, the children are white Belgians but that has changed in the Dardennes’ most recent work.  The eponymous Ahmed is from a Belgian-Asian family.  Eleven-year-old Tori (Pablo Schils) and sixteen-year-old Lokita (Joely Mbundu) are African immigrants to Belgium.

    Parent-child relationships of various kinds have been central to all these pictures until this latest one.  They’re not unimportant in Tori and Lokita but they are markedly different from before.  It isn’t surprising, given the age gap between them, that Lokita feels an almost maternal responsibility for Tori although, as the plot develops, she needs his help too – increasingly urgently.  The film’s actual parent-child relationship is necessarily remote.  Lokita is expected to earn money in Belgium for her family back in Cameroon; she makes several phone calls to her mother, explaining why this is easier said than done.  Lokita has five brothers; they don’t include Tori but in their new country he and Lokita are trying to pass themselves off as orphan siblings from Benin.  Lokita is applying for a work visa:  in the opening scene she’s being interviewed by Belgian immigration officers whose questions focus on her claim to have recognised Tori as her brother in the orphanage he’d been placed in; another sequence shows Tori rehearsing Lokita in the answers she’ll give in her next interview about the orphanage.  It’s later on in the film that we learn the pair actually met on the refugee boat that brought them from Africa to Sicily.

    Other details of Tori’s orphanhood are presumably meant to be true – that his mother died giving birth to him and his uncle claimed the death was due to the newborn’s ‘powers of a witch’.  At any rate, Tori’s status as a persecuted ‘sorcerer child’ in Benin has enabled him to obtain residency in Belgium.  He goes to school and shares a room with Lokita in some kind of youth hostel.  Lokita’s lack of a work visa means she has to live by her wits and earn where she can – not only to provide for herself and Tori but also in order to pay off debts to the Africans who smuggled them into Europe.  Tori is devoted to her, ready with Lokita’s medication for the panic attacks to which she’s prone, joining her in singing to diners in an eatery, for which they’re paid a few euros by the place’s owner, Betim (Alban Ukaj).  He also lets the kids have pizza and focaccia going spare but the bleaker side of their association with Betim soon emerges.  He’s at the centre of a drug ring and the youngsters are two of his couriers.  He offers Lokita bits of extra cash in return for sexual favours – offers she always resists but sometimes can’t refuse.

    When her visa application fails, Betim proposes a deal:  Lokita will tend his cannabis crop, in a remote hangar-like location, for three months; in return, Betim will illegally arrange for her to receive the papers she needs to stay in Belgium.  Betim’s sidekick Luckas (Tijmen Govaerts) drives her to the hash house – Lokita is made to wear a blindfold on the journey – and shows her the ropes.  She has a bed and food but is otherwise shut off from the world; with her phone confiscated, she can’t even communicate with Tori.  The separation distresses them both but fearless, resourceful Tori is determined to end it.  Hiding in Betim’s car, he gets a ride to where Lokita is virtually kept prisoner and finds a way in.

    As usual in a Dardennes film, the setting is the Liège area in the present day and the visuals are dismally realistic:  the scenario can’t end happily unless the brothers have suddenly gone soft, and they haven’t.  It’s nevertheless a shock when Luckas, irritated by Lokita’s anxious protests after he has coldly explained the rules of her new assignment in the cannabis hangar, slaps her face; this moment prefigures the greater shock of the bullet he fires into Lokita’s head in the climax to the film, shortly after she and Tori have escaped from the place. (A second bullet from Luckas follows – just to make sure.)  The film’s closing sequence is Lokita’s funeral, at which Tori speaks briefly.  The closing line is his ‘Now you’re dead and I’m left alone’.  The grimness of Tori and Lokita can push a viewer (this one anyway) into the desperate, futile tactic of telling yourself it’s-only-a-movie though you know full well the whole point of the exercise is to describe and condemn socio-economic and political reality.

    For a while, I wondered if the film was nothing more than that.  I was eventually convinced that it was – and dramatically richer – thanks to the strength of the main characterisations and especially the central relationship.  Tori and Lokita is the third Belgian film in the space of less than two years (after Playground (2021) and Close (2022)) to feature exceptional work from child or adolescent actors.  Joely Mbundu is thoroughly natural as tall, melancholy Lokita; she has a beautiful face and a lovely singing voice.  Pablo Schils is even more remarkable, not least by injecting against-the-odds humour into proceedings.  Tori’s laughter – heard when he asks Lokita a trick question in their run-through for her next grilling by immigration officers and after the boy gets one over on Betim – really is infectious.  On the other hand, Tori’s repeated calling of Lokita’s name is wrenching:  first as he tries, standing outside her cannabis cell, to attract her attention; then when he discovers her dead body.

    Even if the writer-directors are too much realists to be hopeful, their sympathy with the plight of young immigrant exiles in Europe, caught in a pincer movement between bureaucracy and criminal exploiters, does lead the Dardennes to heroise Tori and Lokita unreservedly.  It would take a hard heart, though, to see this treatment as sentimental rather than humane.  What’s also impressive about the brothers as politically serious film-makers is their presentation of the bad guys in the stories they tell.  In the cinema of Ken Loach, the Dardennes’ political confrère, those playing representatives of the iniquitous system that Loach is skewering, are encouraged to interpret their characters as intentionally malign – with the result that they rarely come across as unwitting parts of the same system that is victimising the ‘good’ people in the set-up.  The Dardennes’ approach is more intelligent.  Betim behaves viciously but Alban Ukaj’s good performance never smacks of moral commentary by the actor, as performances in Loach films often do.  Ukaj shows Betim, rather, as enmeshed in an economic structure which compels him, like Lokita and Tori, to work hard for a living.  For Betim, that means sweating to keep up with orders for meals he cooks in the restaurant kitchen as well as organising the supply and sale of marijuana on the streets.

    21 August 2023

  • Dog Day Afternoon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney Lumet  (1975)

    [Two impressions of the film from viewings in the 1970s and 2023 …]

    Take 1

    On August 22nd 1972, at about 3pm, Sonny Wortzik and his friend Salvatore (Sal) Naturile held up a small Brooklyn bank.  An alarm was tripped, the police arrived in force, and the would-be robbers were trapped, along with the staff, inside the hot, airless building (it was ninety-seven degrees outside).  During the evening, the New York police acceded to Wortzik’s demands for transport to Kennedy airport and a jet to the destination of his choice.  At the airport the only aimed gunshot of the entire proceedings was fired, by an FBI man, and killed Naturile.  Wortzik was tried and received a twenty-year prison sentence.

    Sonny Wortzik needed money to finance a sex-change operation for his male ‘wife’, Leon Shermer (who now lives as a woman in New York).  When Martin Bregman and Martin Elfand, the producers of Dog Day Afternoon, first acquired the rights to the story (for a song:  once the film was a success, writs flew thick and fast), they intended to make an exploitation parody movie called ‘The Boys in the Bank’.  Fortunately, the project underwent drastic revision before it reached the screen in late 1975, with a screenplay by Frank Pierson.  The resulting film, well directed by Sidney Lumet, is a skilful and entertaining tragicomedy.  Pierson’s (Oscar-winning) script is full of small, intelligent observations; Lumet’s direction gives the story an odd, farcical energy.  He economically establishes time and place through an opening montage of shots of sweltering, stupefied New Yorkers, accompanied by the sound of blabbing local news reports.  These bulletins persist throughout, with the stakeout of the bank becoming the lead story.  Although Dog Day Afternoon is sometimes self-consciously frenetic, Lumet successfully develops a sense of the overwhelming heat making people’s actions all the crazier.

    It’s not long before the female staff-hostages realise the robbers’ desperation and lack of criminal confidence, start to sympathise with Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale), and resent the police’s clumsy, aggressive tactics.  The women almost get to enjoy being celebrities for a day, although their sporadic excessively high spirits reflect their underlying fear.  The fickle crowd in the street – supporting Sonny when he starts rabble-rousing with yells of ‘Attica!’[1], jeering when they first learn he’s homosexual – wallows in vicarious thrills and proximity to minor history-in-the-making.  Lumet’s narrative juxtaposes, obviously but effectively, the highly personal nature of Sonny’s mission with its public consequences.  Scores of police crouch, hands on holsters.  Busloads of press photographers arrive at the scene of the crime.  Sonny and Sal are the centre of attention but alone too, as far as help and genuine sympathy are concerned.

    The performances are first rate.  Al Pacino’s delivery of a last-will-and-testament speech is especially impressive:  his deadpan reading suggests Sonny’s sudden realisation of how bizarre his situation is – for a few moments, he’s listening almost objectively to the extraordinary legacy that he’s announcing.  John Cazale conveys very well how Sal’s awareness of his desperate inarticulacy adds to his fear.  The eye contact between Pacino and Cazale ensures the non-verbal communication between Sonny and Sal is more eloquent than most of their words.

    A third important acting contribution comes from Chris Sarandon, as the frightened, fragile Leon.  The break-in happens soon after the start of Dog Day Afternoon.  Lumet builds tension in the few minutes of screen time leading up to it but once Sonny and Sal are in the bank, developments outside it are required to sustain momentum.   The scenes of Leon in a police station certainly do that but also introduce a refreshingly different rhythm.  An NYPD detective (excellent Charles Durning) listens, calmly but with increasing shocked incredulity, to the story of Leon’s and Sonny’s relationship before setting up a phone call between them – a conversation punctuated by very convincing stumbles, pauses and expressions of the lovers’ feelings for each other. The bank employees include Sully Boyar (the portly, diabetic, amusingly unsurprised manager), Marcia Jean Kurtz, Carol Kane and Penelope Allen.  James Broderick is the coldly smirking FBI man who eventually shoots Sal.

    [1970s]

     

    Take 2

     In fact, Take 3:  I’ve seen Dog Day Afternoon between the 1970s and now but didn’t record my impressions at the time.  I doubt they’d have been much different from first impressions:  my feelings about Sidney Lumet’s film still haven’t changed much – in contrast to other films on this blog with double-take entries (Goodfellas (1990), Sebastiane (1976)).  This note will gloss just a couple of points …

    The ripples of audience laughter at the start of this NFT1 screening surprised me, though I don’t know why:  it was only the usual we-must-make-clear-we’re-having-a-good-time noise which, also as usual, petered out after a while.  Ironic then that in the early stages Sidney Lumet and his cast don’t encourage this kind of reaction but do sometimes encourage it further into the narrative.  The situation in the bank is remarkably bizarre from the start but the robbers’ uncertainty is hardly comical:  it invites immediate sympathy for their plight as well as that of their hostages.  (This is especially well illustrated as Sonny fumbles the removal of his gun from the gift box that was meant to conceal it.)  Later on, Lumet allows some overplaying among the bank employees as they relish their sudden, unexpected celebrity.  This impression probably does have to do with the passage of time:  everyone-will-be-famous-for-fifteen-minutes syndrome has become such a cliché that the emphasis given to it here now seems crudely superfluous.  And Lumet tends to overwork scenes involving the crowd that gathers outside the bank.  Their fickle reactions to the robbery, even though you accept the essential truth of them, are too staged.

    But the main players – Al Pacino, John Cazale, Chris Sarandon and Charles Durning – are wonderful.  Each of them has good comedy moments; none of them lets you forget what a confused, sad story this is.  Two sequences that felt like highlights forty-odd years ago still do.   The exchange between Sonny in the bank and Leon, flanked by police and FBI men, is one of modern Hollywood’s most memorable phone conversations.  The second standout is Sonny’s dictation of his will to Sylvia (Penelope Allen), the bank’s senior teller.  Pacino’s work in both these scenes is a wonderful advertisement for Method acting (and Sonny Wortzik remains one of his finest screen creations).  In a previous, grimly funny outburst, Sonny angrily lists all the things he’s responsible for in the crazy situation that he has caused; this ends with his asking the bank manager, in sarcastic exasperation, ‘You want me to give you the gun – you want to take over?’   The provisions of Sonny’s will are comparably complicated but the tone and tempo of this scene quite different from that earlier litany; they have more in common with the phone conversation with Leon.  Dog Day Afternoon (although perhaps a few minutes too long) is always entertaining.  But Sidney Lumet, by taking his foot off the pedal in the later stages, develops a more distinctive rhythm – an almost tragic momentum.  Al Pacino has a lot to do with this; the great John Cazale, as saturnine, ill-fated Sal, has even more.

    17 August 2023

    [1]  Afternote:  The chant refers to the uprising at New York’s Attica prison in 1971.

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