Tori et Lokita

The Dardenne brothers' (Luc and Jean-Pierre) latest is another in their generally low key, but precisely well-observed tales. Adolescent Tori (Pablo Schils) and his older sister Lokita (Joely Mbundu) are African immigrants in Belgium who are fighting to remain in their new country together. Immigration officials are dubious of their claims with the elder woman being on particularly shaky ground.

The plot dynamics are, as is almost always the case with the Dardennes, less important than the day to day lives of the main characters. Tori and Lokita must not only deal with the government, but, also the prejudices of local law enforcement and citizenry, but, also an entire underground system which takes abusive advantage of their migrant status. It becomes an acutely painful reality that Tori and Lokita often are put in the position of breaking the law in order to remain "within" the law.

Schils and Mbundu have natural screen presences that transcend the dialogue. Their wills to survive shine through even if their characters may lack the ability to verbalize their struggle. Alban Ukaj is effective as a slimy local businessman who humiliates the immigrants even as he professes to be assisting them.

TORI AND LOKITA is a bit too brief to fully capture the totality of their lives, but, there's a humanity, and, for the Dardennes, even a bit of righteous anger that manages to make its points.

Before I begin this review, I should note that I am Belgian myself, and that I therefore happily applaud any movie originating from my country as there aren't many of them releasing.

That being said, this film might leave you a little unsatisfied. The story is about an immigrant girl trying to get an allowance to remain in Belgium instead of having to return to her country of origin. Meanwhile, she has to take care of her younger brother.

The story itself is intriguing and honestly quite interesting to see. A lot of it feels very realistic and profound, and that dept to the characters is felt through their connections to other characters. However, the writing, at times, is not so good. The dialogue given to a small boy doesn't fully feel appropriate, nor does it feel very intentional to make him feel more mature. It contains a lot of sentences that a child that young just wouldn't say.

At the other hand, the actor who plays the young brother Tori did his job very well. He plays the boy in a very dynamic and organic style and deserves quite a bit of praise. This can, sadly, not be said about the lead of this movie, Lokita. She is played quite blandly, with very stiff dialogue and, and this does disappoint me quite a bit, a feeling as if she just reciting her lines. Her actions feel as if they are just being read from the script, and although this isn't completely the fault of the directors, and I'm sure the actress did her best as well, this does hurt the movie quite a bit.

The plot of the film is quite complex in that it is, as I said above, quite a realistic picture, yet also not a straightforward one. There are a lot of situations where choices need to be made that don't seem to be the good ones, yet they are the only ones the characters can make to survive. The plot is also quite good, really, with one big problem. It ends way to soon.

The film is just shy of an hour and a half, yet it feels as if it was written as a two hour picture. The last half hour seems to have just been forgotten, leaving a lot of subplots, but also just the main plot, unresolved, which is in more than one way very unsatisfying. It really feels as if they had two hours of a picture, noticed too late that the deadline was due the day after, and just wrapped it up. I am sure that isn't what happened. It is just a way of describing the feeling I had leaving the theatre, but knowing that this was an intentional choice only makes it worse.

So overall, it is a film with a few ups and downs. It has a great premise, and a few scenes that will really move you and even take you to the edge of your seat, but it fails quite dramatically on other facets, mainly the ending, dialogue and lead. It is therefore not necessarily a movie I would suggest to others, but if you watch it, I'm sure you won't feel as if you wasted money on a ticket either.

Considering there is debut for both in main cast, Joely Mbundu and Pablo Schils, no doubt they gave top of performances. The chemistry between is so touchable and we can feel their natural bond through that acting. It is the picture how usually goes that process of adaptation of refugees in foreign territory, which does not favor them with good intentions. I didn't expect to see such a good movie, by that fact that I didn't have in my schedule at all to see it during one movie festival, but suddenly changed my mind and entered that cinema hall where it started to play. I wasn't wrong. If you decide to see it, you will follow a strong emotionally and at the end sad story, after watching it, it will stay in your memory.

This has a large thumping heart deep down, where clearly the Dardennes brothers (Luc and Jean Pierre) want these characters to make it through some how and some way in their dire circumstances. There is (as David Erhlich notes in his review) anger underneath all of this, anger at how embedded exploitation of the undocumented are, how no one (insert meme) will think of the children and so on, how everything comes down to "where are your papers" and an absence of emapathy.

That may be enough for the film to power through in depicting these kids, Tori (Schils) and Lokita (Mbundu), who are exceptional as child/teen performers go for what they're asked to show and embody. This does work as a tension-filled thriller especially in the second half, but compared to some of the other Dardennes films it is almost expectedly sad and, when seeing Lakita in her indentured servitude in the Marijuana farm it becomes even sort of dreary as a stark drama of circumstance and dread.

This isn't to say the film isn't worth seeing because it does keep you absorbed into both of these kid's plight and also how resourceful and quick on his feet Tori is (you think they will be apart for three months but hey not so fast, guys). But once the Dardennes get us to that ending, for all of the film's virtue and how much heart Mbundu puts into her performance in particular, it all feels like "well... that really sucks" and the catharsis isn't as powerful as it should feel.

Maybe that's more my problem than yours, but since everything has been presented at such a Naturalistic slice-of-life key, that moment just feels like it... happens, and it just reminds me why I'll always hold something like De Sica/Zavatiini's Shoeshine - also about kids lost in a prison they can't escape until it is too late - in such higher regard because it goes for real *and* melodrama and feels more ambitious.

Tori and Lokita broke my heart. The final minutes of this drama played with my heart so unabashedly I had to resort to crying. Thinking of kids in my family, thinking of a little boy and a girl in my family who are so close to my heart. The Dardenne Brothers do their thing again in building a story that speaks volumes of the current, tried times. In here, they narrate the story of a boy and an elder girl who are hoping for a better life together in Belgium as siblings having left Africa as refugees. Yet in the developed world, they face rampant bureaucracy, corruption, child labour, and abuse. By the end of it all - it's the same story we all know - I was devastated. I may never watch this film again.

(Watched at the 2022 International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK) in Trivandrum.)