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