Tori and Lokita

TORI AND LOKITA   ***

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

2022

IDEA:  African migrant children Tori and Lokita struggle to make a living in modern-day Belgium.

BLURB:  The relationship between Tori and Lokita is one of the purest and sweetest in the Dardenne brothers’ filmography. Bonded by circumstance, they are each other’s confidants, moral support, and first and last source of solace in a late-capitalist Europe that barely sees them as human. As is the case in all Dardenne films, their survival is contingent on acquiescing to systems of exploitation that exclude them as beneficiaries, their social relationships dictated by transactions that serve only greedy authorities. Tori and Lokita face an uphill battle from the beginning, and the rapport created by Mbundu Joely and Pablo Schils is so fierce, tender, and emotionally persuasive that we can’t bear to see anything come between them. That things do - in progressively violent ways - is an inevitability the Dardennes sometimes struggle with making seem organic. Though the directors’ customary lack of sentimentality keeps the film from devolving into mawkish miserabilism, a sense of overly engineered grimness persists in the predictably worsening gauntlet of tribulations through which they put their protagonists. Tori and Lokita is absent of the moral complexity that defines the filmmakers’ best work, as it operates on a neat dichotomy between innocent, victimized children and callously cruel adults. Yet there is purpose to this schematic bluntness, not to mention righteous indignation. The Dardennes draw a straight line from systemic injustice to economic desperation to crime and abuse; they plainly convey how the paucity of options afforded by the state to migrants and refugees paves the way for tragedy. The deeply upsetting conclusion of Tori and Lokita refuses to obscure that reality.