A mind so fine no idea could violate it? Midway through Tori et Lokita – the Dardenne Brother’s latest film – there’s a sequence that brings home the flaw in T.S. Eliot’s noble praise-line. The Dardennes crystallize an idea that’s suffused with feeling. What happens on screen isn’t a reduction or an abstraction or a violation. It’s an act of imagination.
The Dardennes have been doing it naturalistically ever since their second film, La Promesse (1996). Before they made that movie, Brother Luc mused in his diary in August of 1993 about their first failed shot at a fiction film after making documentaries in the 80s…
We need to push further with our rejection of aestheticism. One should not feel the (re)mediation of the decor, the actors, the lighting, etc. All of these elements need to be fused into one emotion, one impression of life that is raw, unadorned, which is taking place before the camera but might have been conducted in its absence. The camera will try to follow, not wait, and will not know.
The Dardennes’ crystallizations are never about being in the know. They’re all about finding out as you go. Suddenly, you’re at the mercy of a perception that seems to have come out of nowhere, slipping (or sometimes breaking) into your brain as you’re heading somewhere else along with a character who’s become the vector of social truth…
Tori et Lokita begins in media res. You-are-there as two African immigrants in a Belgian city – a young woman called Lokita (Mbundu Joely) and a boy called Tori (Pablo Schils) – improvise their way through everyday life in the illegal economy. They have endured a terrible journey to get from Africa to Europa, and are now in a children’s home for immigrants, where they’re claiming to be brother and sister to give Lokita a chance at working papers. It’s not much of a stretch for them to pretend to be family as they are as tight as any siblings. Yet they can’t fool Belgian bureaucrats. Desperate for cash with Lokita still owing money to African traffickers – pretend-Christers who rough her up in a chilling scene – the duo sells drugs under cover of delivering pizzas. Lokita then makes a deal with their supplier – a scumbag who demands sexual favors from her – to work outside the city for a season so she can buy fake papers. She’s taken blindfolded to a secret cannabis farm in what looks like a fortified hangar in the province of Nowhere. Locked into this sprawling windowless space, she tends pot plants growing under hot lights, watches tv and lives on frozen dinners brought by criminal minders who check in on her occasionally. Without her phone, she can’t contact Tori, which is unbearable for both of them. Tori manages to find his way to where Lokita is locked away. What comes next is a scene that seems like a sequence in a horror movie as Tori tries to bust into the fire trap where his soul sister is hidden…
A long take…that follows physically and emotionally intense action through the halls and rooms of the drug greenhouse lasts almost five minutes, but it’s executed with such offhand confidence you never think of it as a logistical feat. [1]
It’s a metaphorical feat too. Though I didn’t twig the figure in the hangar until my second watch. As Tori strived (all over again), to get IN to this truly scary place, I grasped the meaning of the struggle going down on screen. Lokita’s prison house of exile – an unnatural compaction of science and consumerism, detail work and dead time, high civilization and barbarism – stands for Europe.
It occurs to me that indefatigable Tori – a draughtsman as well as a clever-charmer who was driven out of his home country due to rumors he was a “sorcerer-child”—is one of those exceptional African migrants who might just make it Over There (like the young actor who plays him so livingly/perfectly).
Not that the Dardennes have made a Social Darwinist case study or a twisted brief for careers open to artful dodgers. Without a hint of self-righteous raging, their movie underscores good Belgians’ gross obliviousness to the condition of working class African immigrants in their nation.
The Dardennes have a history of putting scenes on screen that get to the nub of what it means to be an exile in the E.U.’s promised land. I’m reminded of their breakthrough film, La Promesse, which follows a young African mother with an infant who’s on the road in a grey Belgian city trying to find out what happened to her husband – another illegal who’s gone missing. (She’s accompanied by a white teen who knows, though he can’t bring himself to tell, that her husband is dead since the kid’s monster of a father bossed the crew of undocumented migrants who worked on the construction site where the African died in an accident.) At one point the widow finds a stand pipe under a bridge where she washes up. As she comes out from under the archway, a rando passing on the bridge up above feels nature’s call and piss rains down on her head.
I felt like I needed a bath after reading Armond White’s review (in National Review) of Tori et Lokita. White is a proud reactionary who opens his piece by invoking the fantasy of a “Biden-administered invasion at the U.S. southern border.” [Emp. Supp.] White is an ideologue whose mind has been violated by right-wing propaganda. Yet some memory of justice and affection for the art of cinema keeps him from simply lying on the Dardennes.
The Dardennes’ film style — contrasting goodness with undeniable oppression — is bracingly naturalistic and emotionally precise…
Few filmmakers can match the Dardenne brothers’ simple vision and adroit craftsmanship. Each social perception seems assured, a measure of the modern moment and of colonialism’s consequence. Observing the black Africans and the white Europeans as products of history enriches the Dardennes’ post-neorealist humanism.
The Dardenne brothers are smart; Pierre studied drama, Jean-Luc studied philosophy, and they balance each other’s gifts.
White seems to wrestle with himself, trying to quash the felt identification with Lokita and Tori that sneaks into his piece’s final paragraph…
Watching earnest Lokita enslaved to a drug cartel, deprived of a fulfilling womanhood, while resourceful Tori, working his heart out, riding a bike bigger than himself…
But White rights his own bike with a…
…merely [Is there any true thing that can’t be defaced by that word? B.D.] appeases bleeding-heart sanctimony. The Dardennes’ latest sentimental view of the Other amounts to politicized anthropomorphism — even the title “Tori and Lokita” sounds like a woke Disney cartoon about darling forest creatures. Yes, the film is heartrending, but no more so than a progressive’s version of Bambi.
Tori et Lokita has a killer ending that’s thought-miles away from Bambi’s happy forest finish. My son wondered if the end might be too despairing. He was in tune with a Times reviewer (one I rarely chime with) who allowed Tori et Lokita’s hard shock-ending left her feeling extra-bereft. She wondered why the Dardennes had settled on cold turkey for their audience since they’ve never been afraid to try on warmer tones in their previous movies even if they’ve always avoided unearned emotions. Until she realized the entire movie is a fictional testament to what happened before the audience was present — the graceful moment in Tori’s and Lokita’s back story that brought them together so they could know (and teach us) what love is.
May my old comrade Armond White recall — without mere-ing it away — his own loving, teacherly side. (It’s true he never commended Bambi but I’m flashing on the copy of Hiawatha he once gave me for my little boy.)
Note
1 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/tori-and-lokita-movie-review-2023.